8 Miscast Movie Roles That Received A Bizarre Amount Of Praise

7. Gwyneth Paltrow - Shakespeare In Love

Shakespeare In Love is best remembered nowadays as one of the less deserving Best Picture winners in Academy Awards history - a notion that isn't helped by Gwyneth Paltrow's frankly dull and retrospectively mediocre performance as Viola de Lesseps, the daughter of a wealthily merchant who has to pretend to be a boy so that she can hang out with Shakespeare and perform in his plays. She won an Oscar, and yet... shouldn't all Best Actress-winning performances remain - above all - memorable? Hardly anybody recalls this one. So presumably the Academy got caught up in the fact that an American Paltrow was talking in a British accent, because that's the only remotely interesting thing going on here (and it's not quite as convincing now as it seemed at the time). People genuinely remember Paltrow's frankly awkward Oscar acceptance speech over her oddly flat performance here, though, which kind of sums the whole thing up: if she was that forgettable as Viola, she was obviously miscast. The Praise: She won an Oscar for Best Actress, yes, and a Golden Globe, too. Not sure the words "Oscar-Winner" and "Gwyneth Paltrow" go together, though.