Best Picture, Best Lead Actress - Gwyneth Paltrow (1998) How do you canonize the entire works of William Shakespeare in a 2-hour movie while also inserting a weird amount of comedy and a purely fictional love affair between the famous author and a would-be-actress played by Gwyneth Paltrow? Clumsily. People got their pants all sticky with joy when this hit the theaters, because finally they could see Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet the way it was meant to be seen: as a haphazard rom-com stuffed to the brim with winking allusions to every famous line Shakespeare ever wrote. Worse than all that, though, is Paltrow's bland, boring, barely breathing portrayal of the great bard's love interest. She sucks. She sucks super hard. The fact that a movie devoting so much screen time to such a soulless caricature of an Elizabethan-era damsel would win not only Best Picture, but also give Paltrow an award for Best Lead Actress, begs the question: "Talent, talent! Wherefore art thou, talent?"
