Have just seen 45 minutes — movie’s first 45, my last — of Shakespeare in Love. I now understand several things:
1) Blonde hair combined with the ability to use polysyllabic words (correctly or not) is so confounding to Academy voters that I’m personally just one cup size and a pink dress away from my own Oscar.
2) No matter how unwatchable the movie, if you mention Shakespeare in it some folks will think it’s important and be unduly proud of themselves for surviving the evening. If you can work in a Stratford-on-Avon joke to stir up some self-congratulation on remembering that obscure data point from junior-high English, you may as well just rent the tux in advance.
3) You can take the crappy girl-movie out of the Lifetime Network lineup, but…