How did this film ever win Oscars?

Rating: 3/10 (2 February 2001)

Now and then a film comes along which is praised to the skies but which, when you see it, is just so dreadful that you wonder whether you are mad and the rest of the world is sane, or vice versa.
This is a "comedy" which did not raise a single laugh in the cinema in which I saw it. The script is pathetic. Jack Nicholson over-acts dramatically as the central character, and my reaction to Helen Hunt was to hope that she spent as little time on screen as possible. In her TV role as an ugly, neurotic, abrasive wife she was superb. Seeing her in this film, you suddenly realise she probably wasn't acting. Remember the days when actresses looked like Sophia Loren, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, etc? And comedies were genuinely funny and acted by the likes of Cary Grant? Whatever has happened to the American movie?