The low-hanging fruit here is, of course, that Shakespeare didn't write the story of Romeo and Juliet at all as with virtually all of his plays, he was adapting fairly well-known source material into his own highly characteristic idiom, and so there would have been no tormented process of devising a narrative. Specifically, it's about how his passionate, whirlwind romance with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), a woman much above his station, helped to break his writer's block, by showing him what love truly is. Shakespeare in Love is, for all its cleverness and wit and cunning, pretty dumb, actually: it's the story of how Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) was only able to write Romeo and Juliet because incidents and overheard snatches of speech in his everyday life kept giving him inspiration to directly incorporate those things into the drama. The old-fashioned part is, well, the ludicrous construction.
Meanwhile, the quantity of theater-nerd in-jokes makes the whole thing feel like a meta-narrative game, in which we're constantly reminded that we're watching a movie about William Shakespeare, and that the whole thing is a bit of a ludicrous construction. People speak with modern (or, at least, '90s-modern) attitude and cadences, but the words they say have a distinct out-of-time quality there's not much if anything that's period-authentic about the vocabulary of this costume drama set in 1593, but it does a fine job of suggesting a more formal, stately, stagelike way of speaking that keeps the contemporary vibe from turning the rest of the film into a mockery.
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It's a wonderful combination of the old-fashioned and the new the new comes largely in the form of its Tom Stoppard screenplay (rewriting an original draft by Marc Norman), which has a zippy, postmodern-lite take on the matter of how to do a costume drama. The point is, whether it was the best of five arbitrarily-selected films or not, Shakespeare in Love is pretty damn good, and deserves better than to be forever thought of as the unfair winner of an award that very rarely has enough of a sense of humor to go for anything this legitimately pleasurable to watch. * The frustrating thing, I get it, is that Shakespeare in Love didn't win on its intrinsic merits, but because future convict Harvey Weinstein basically paid for a victory, in the all-time peak of the Miramaxification of the Academy Awards. And hell, as long as we're going there, I think Elizabeth is about on par with Saving Private Ryan.
If you click on that link and compare my star ratings, you'll note that I don't think that's too much of a problem - certainly not compared to how Shakespeare in Love also beat The Thin Red Line for that Oscar.
There's no way around the elephant in the room, so it's best just to start with it, and clear it out: yes, Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar for Best Picture, and because of that, Saving Private Ryan did not.
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