Sigh. About the Oscar...

Rating: 10/10 (15 December 2001)

Obviously it would have been more just to give the Best Picture award to "Life is Beautiful", but I'm in two minds as to whether or not this would have been a good thing. Foreign language films have always been implicitly disqualified from being declared Best Picture, so much so that they have their own special category - so why not be honest and disqualify them explicitly?
So let's rule "Life is Beautiful" out. GIVEN the remaining nominees ("Elizabeth", "Saving Private Ryan", "The Thin Red Line"), I don't see how anyone could deny that "Shakespeare in Love" was at least a plausible choice. Some people are understandably upset that Miramax "bought" the award, by advertising heavily, but this has been going on for decades - and at least Miramax had the grace to keep its advertising out of the film itself, unlike certain other entrants I could mention. This is a film that was made first and entered into competition afterwards. There's not a trace of pomposity about it, not a single character pointing out to us, for the benefit of the judges, that the script is profound. Grandiloquent posturing has often won in the past ("Dances with Wolves", "Unforgiven", "Forrest Gump"), and I'm rather pleased that, at least this once, it didn't. I'm also pleased that the award went to, loosely speaking, a comedy. THAT hadn't happened for 21 years, and I'm not sure it will ever happen again.
Anyway, I don't see how it could be that there are people who actually RESENT a film so beautiful, charming, and intelligent. Granted, it tells us nothing about how Shakespeare created his plays, but how could it? And would it be cinematically interesting even if it could? I doubt it. "Topsy-Turvy" (possibly the best picture of 1999, by the way, and not even nominated) went into the nuts and bolts of staging a theatrical work in greater and more loving detail than any other film I've seen, but on the topic of primary creation - how Gilbert came up with his words, how Sullivan came up with his notes - it was silent. What was there to say?
"Shakespeare in Love" is more concerned with what Shakespeare has in common with everyone else, and also what he has in common with other artists - even the untalented ones. That it's not a serious historical account is established by the working title it offers of "Romeo and Juliet" - "Romeo and Ethyl, the Pirate's Daughter". (It's a joke straight out of "Blackadder".) The point is that we see a plausible picture of a genius living and breathing, which he does the same way everyone else does.
By the way, if you want to see Geoffrey Rush at his best, in his best role, this is it. He's perfect in his small role of eccentric theatre manager (although he fails to steal any scenes from more capable performers like Judi Dench, Joseph Fiennes, Colin Firth...). He should stick to this kind of thing. There is, as everyone has noticed, a distinct shortage of good character actors.