American Idol loser to Academy Award nominee

There is early speculation that Jennifer Hudson--who came in 7th on Season Three of American Idol--could get a Supporting Actress nomination for Dreamgirls this year.

A recent Fox News report on a screening of clips from Dreamgirls had this to say:

And then Jennifer Hudson — playing Effie, the part that Jennifer Holliday made famous — opens her mouth. Fantasia is a great singer, but Hudson is startling here. In the same way that Queen Latifah broke through in “Chicago,” Jennifer Hudson is about to conquer the world in “Dreamgirls.” She and her mother didn’t even understand what was happening afterwards, when every single person in that room crowded around them brandishing cameras, tape recorders, and business cards.

If Clive Davis is smart, he will get Hudson into a recording studio this summer and have an album out in time for the Oscars next February. Because Jennifer Hudson is going to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress without a doubt.

If you need to be convinced, just watch this trailer (which is almost entirely a clip of her singing) and remember that Queen Latifah got an Oscar nomination in that category basically just for singing reasonably well:



UPDATE: It turns out that the clip used in the trailer for this movie is not, in fact, Jennifer Hudson. It's the original Jennifer Holliday version of the song, considered to be possibly the best singing in Broadway history. I guess J-Hud's Oscar status is not so set in stone.

That's incredibly deceptive, though. Jennifer Holliday was famously great, but they can't just assume everyone watching the trailer has heard her version at all, let alone heard it recently enough to recognize it in this context. What if they had released a teaser trailer for Chicago that was entirely Bebe Neuwirth singing the end of All That Jazz? Wouldn't most people assume it was Catherine Zeta-Jones?