Lady Gaga Just Received Two Oscar Nominations. Here's Why 2019 Could Be Her Most Profitable Year Ever

It's hard to imagine Lady Gaga moving up even higher on the list of world's biggest and richest celebrities, but that's bound to happen now that she was just nominated for two 2019 Oscars for her performance in A Star Is Born.

Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, Lady Gaga was a musical prodigy who learned to play the piano at age 4 and first performed in a New York City nightclub at 14. She's had a remarkably successful career in music and acting for over a decade — and her stardom and wealth are hitting astonishing new heights in 2019.

Ten years after her debut album, The Fame, was released in 2008 with its monster hit songs "Just Dance" and "Poker Face" — which are still played on the radio and have been sold more than 7 million times each — Lady Gaga became a lead actress in her first major movie, in the Bradley Cooper film A Star Is Born. She was just nominated for the Best Actress and Best Original Song categories at the 2019 Academy Awards, which are scheduled for Sunday, February 24, starting at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

This is her first nomination in the acting category.

In addition to her accolades for her performances in film, 2019 is also shaping up as a huge and lucrative one for Lady Gaga in terms of the genre she is better known for: music. Lady Gaga is in the midst of a special Las Vegas residency in which she is reportedly earning more than $1 million per concert.

While much is unknown about Lady Gaga's finances, her net worth has been estimated at $300 million by the website CelebrityNetWorth.com. Lady Gaga's net worth could soon dwarf even that sizeable figure, however, assuming that the 32-year-old star's string of success in music and acting has just begun hitting its stride.

Lady Gaga's Oscar Nominations and Awards

Lady Gaga is following up her two Golden Globe nominations (and one 2019 Golden Globe award win, for Best Original Song, "Shallow") with two Oscar nominations. She is up for the 2019 Oscar Best Actress award, and "Shallow" from A Star Is Born is the strong favorite to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. A Star Is Born itself is also a nominee in Best Picture.

This isn't the first time Lady Gaga has been nominated for an Academy Award. Lady Gaga was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Oscar in 2016 in the Best Original Song category for "Till It Happens to You" from the documentary The Hunting Ground, and she won the Golden Globe that year.

Lady Gaga has also been nominated for dozens of other major awards for her work in music and on screen over the years. She won a Golden Globe in 2016 for acting on the TV show American Horror Story, and was nominated three times for Primetime Emmys, including a nomination for her performance during the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show. Lady Gaga has received 24 Grammy nominations (and counting) and won six times over the years.

How Much Money Lady Gaga Makes Per Year

Lady Gaga has regularly been one of the world's highest-earning celebrities over the past decade. In 2011, she beat out Oprah Winfrey to top the Celebrity 100 list, the Forbes ranking based on the most powerful and influential people in the entertainment business. Lady Gaga reportedly earned $90 million that year.

Lady Gaga's earnings in 2014 fell to $33 million, which was still good enough to place her among the top 10 highest-earning women in music. In 2018, Lady Gaga's earnings were estimated at $50 million by Forbes, good for fifth place on the list of highest-paid women in music.

Lady Gaga makes money in a variety of ways, including a spectrum of endorsement deals with brands like Barnes & Noble, Versace, Google Chrome, and Bud Light, as well as sales of digital music, merchandise, and concert tickets. She has had five #1 albums on the Billboard charts, including A Star Is Born, which debuted at No. 1 last October. All together, Lady Gaga has tallied up well over 11 million album sales and 50 million digital song sales.

Several Lady Gaga tours have boasted tremendous success over the years, including $125 million in gross ticket sales for the 2012 "Born This Way" tour, $227 million for the 2009-2011 "Monster Ball" tour, and $95 million in ticket sales for the smaller, more recent "Joanne tour."

What's more, Lady Gaga's 2019 earnings may far surpass how much she's made in previous years. Her song and album sales are sure to spike due to the excitement over the Oscar nominations, the amount of money she'll command for future acting roles will skyrocket, and ticket prices for her extended string of performances in Las Vegas are sky high.

Lady Gaga Las Vegas Residency Could Break Records

In December, Lady Gaga began her special Las Vegas residency at the Park Theater inside the Park MGM resort. Lady Gaga's residency actually consists of two separate shows: "Enigma," which focuses on her pop hits, and "Lady Gaga Jazz + Piano," featuring performances from the Great American Songbook (and, occasionally, duets with Tony Bennett).

Lady Gaga's Las Vegas residency will stretch through 2019 with dozens of performances now through November. Demand for Lady Gaga tickets in Vegas is extremely high: Ticketmaster is now listing general admission seats starting at a whopping $698 for some dates, though ticket prices start under $100 for some performances. Variety reported that Gaga is guaranteed to make over $1 million per show in Las Vegas, and her total earnings for her Park Theater performances could top $100 million.

If these figures are accurate, Lady Gaga would easily break the record for the highest-earning Las Vegas residency on a nightly basis. For the sake of comparison, enormous stars like Celine Dion, Elton John, and Britney Spears rarely, if ever, averaged earning more than $500,000 per night for their Las Vegas residencies.

Lady Gaga's Home in Malibu

In 2014, Gaga paid $22.5 million for 10,000-square-foot home on six acres in Malibu, California, that she calls her "gypsy palace." Before then, Lady Gaga had been renting a penthouse apartment on Central Park in New York City for $22,000 per month. Gaga's property in Malibu includes a fenced-in ring where she rode Arabella, her beloved horse who passed away in early 2019.

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper first met during a Saturday Night Live performance about five years ago. Cooper first agreed to remake A Star Is Born in 2016, and after seeing Gaga perform at a benefit hosted by Sean Parker in Los Angeles, he immediately began pursuing her to star in the film as Ally. He went to Gaga's home in Malibu to discuss the movie and the role, and Cooper told Vogue that it was basically magic from the get-go:

“She came down the stairs and we went out to her patio and I saw her eyes, and honestly, it clicked and I went, Wow.” He pretty much offered her the part on the spot. “She said, ‘Are you hungry?’ and I said, ‘I’m starving,’ and we went into her kitchen for spaghetti and meatballs.”

To make sure that Cooper and Lady Gaga could sing together convincingly on film, they recorded themselves singing an old folk song, "Midnight Special," at Gaga's Malibu home at that first meeting. "I turned on my phone and we did the song," Cooper said to Vogue. "It was crazy. It kind of just worked. And that video is one of the things I showed to Warner Bros. to get the movie green-lit.”