‘Shakespeare in Love’ didn't deserve to be an Oscar villain
On awards season drama, romantic sentimentality, and the art of making art
In “You’ve Got Rom-Com,” pop culture critic and When Romance Met Comedy writer Caroline Siede examines the history of the romantic comedy genre one film at a time. This column is available only to paid subscribers. To commission a column on your favorite rom-com, subscribe at the Rom-Com Patron tier.
There’s something about a sentimental movie about William Shakespeare that really raises film snobs’ hackles. Before Timothée Chalamet vs. ballet became the Oscar drama de jour, Hamnet was somewhat inexplicably the closest thing this year’s race had to a “villain.” Meanwhile, USA Today’s recent list of worst Best Picture winners put Shakespeare in Love in its ninth slot. It’s been nearly 30 years and a segment of Oscar lovers still can’t get over an Elizabethan rom-com beating Saving Private Ryan for the top prize at the 71st Academy Awards.
Part of the skepticism is understandable. Shakespeare in Love’s win is tied up in some aggressive, underhanded Oscar campaigning from Miramax founder (and now famed sex offender) Harvey Weinstein. There’s a sense that Shakespeare in Love’s win wasn’t “fair”—although given how much Oscar campaigning has become the norm since the late ’90s, that perhaps feels less egregious now than it once did. But there’s also a sense that Shakespeare in Love didn’t deserve its win because it’s all the things we deem “unserious” in filmmaking: lighthearted, sentimental, romantic, and aimed at a female audience as much as a male one. Earnest melodrama in a war picture or a gangster thriller is one thing, but in a romantic comedy, it’s not generally so respected.
Indeed, rewatching Shakespeare in Love, what jumps out immediately is that they just don’t make films with this tone anymore. Since the dawn of the 21st century, cynicism and detachment have increasingly become the preferred mode of cinema. We want everything to tinged with snark and irony. True, full-throated sincerity has become a rare, undervalued currency. Shakespeare in Love trades in it, while still feeling grown-up and horny and self-referential and just a little bit transgressive.
