Oscar Battles: Part I

This is the first of a collection of new weekly polls determining if the "robbed" were really robbed. They will be located (as usual) on the main page at The Film Lair , and will be updated every Friday. Every poll will be a keenly disputed victory, and we'll be seeing if we can right a few wrongs, or lay matters to rest. This is Part 1 of 10 - the '98 duel of Blanchett versus Paltrow.

Now, I've put this one first because every so often when I visit Oscar Forums, there is a post titled 'biggest oscar snubs' and this always gets mentioned before any other. If I was with Blanchett on this one, then yeah it would be fine. But I'm not. Paltrow totally 'gets' her film and is my clear favourite, so I regularly find myself defending her to the death. I think a lot of the bitterness towards Paltrow is because of the heavy Miramax campaign behind Shakespeare in Love, which propelled it over Saving Private Ryan. However, I'm inclined to believe that Paltrow's win is not a product of a marketing campaign, and that it would have been justly rewarded regardless. Because I'm always outnumbered on this, I am pretty much expecting a Blanchett landslide. Still, surprises do happen.

There are a lot of similarities to the two performances and characters. They both live in the Elizabethan period (fairly obvious in Blanchett's case), they both mingle with Joseph Fiennes, and they are both somewhat complex, even if in completely different ways. You're voting for the performance remember and not the career.