Hacker Cinema
Shakespeare in Love
1998 · Film · 124 min
Directed by John Madden
Young William Shakespeare is forced to stage his latest comedy, 'Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter', before it's even written. When lovely noblewoman Viola de Lesseps auditions for a role, they fall into forbidden love — and Shakespeare's play finds a new life (and title). As their relationship intensifies, the comedy soon transforms into tragedy.
1 positive4 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
Almost everyone here will have seen a movie he was the screenwriter for or contributed to: Shakespeare in Love, Brazil, Empire of the Sun, even bits of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
A lot of folks here will have read either Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Arcadia, which are still probably his best plays, and certainly the best introduction to his work. I personally also really like The Invention of Love, about the gloomy tortured homosexual poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman, which was also apparently Stoppard's favorite of his plays. It's definitely niche territory though and you might need to care at least just a little about A Shropshire Lad and latin textual criticism. The Coast of Utopia is even more packed with history and erudition, although worth a read; the currently top comment here is a quote from it about death, childhood, and the pursuit of happiness.
He had an interesting combination of traits that many HN readers will probably appreciate: erudite to the point of elitism, although never attended college; a self-described "small c. conservative in politics, literature, education and theatre" with libertarian inclinations, but he wrote a sprawling trilogy about 19th-century Russian socialist and anarchist exiles (The Coast of Utopia).
Now that he's dead, I want to go back and re-read all his plays, including the ones I never managed to get to before.
The Oscars often don't agree with critics, either. I don't think anyone had Ordinary People, Dances with Wolves, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Crash, Green Book, even CODA at #1 on their year-end best of list. Best Picture is usually going to favor something that is at least serious enough that the voters don't feel like children for loving it, i.e. they're never going to award a tentpole or franchise entry, sci-fi, fantasy, horror genre-type stuff will only very rarely even be considered, but they're also going to favor relatively inoffensive, unchallenging, often feel good work that isn't particularly novel or ground-breaking, which is more what critics will lean toward. They also have a tendency to reward message movies and films about filmmaking and Hollywood itself, even if no one likes them.
I also found Shakespeare in Love to be one of the wittiest comedy movies of all time.
There is a definitive movie scene for that -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_KXbKa2crI :) The punchline is around the 1:05 mark.
I believe that set a record for fewest minutes on screen in an Oscar-winning role. (Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.)
The important question is: how likely is this to change the results? In recent decades there's been a trend for the Best Picture Oscar to wind up going to films which may not be all that good but which are seen as "Oscar-worthy" due to weighty subject matter or otherwise "seeming smart". Historical dramas have made up something like twenty out of the last thirty years' winners, including such so-so films as Braveheart. No comedy has won since Shakespeare in Love (which was acceptably smart-seeming because it had Shakespeare in it) and before that it was Annie Hall (which, incidentally, beat Star Wars).
I wonder if preferential ranking will improve the quality of winners by better reflecting the true preferences of the voters rather than the preferences the voters seem to think they ought to have.