I was curious, so I looked up the Oscars for 1999, 60 years after Hollywood's annus mirabilis (1939), though I think what I've got here were films made in 1998. Yes, I know that a lot of people think very highly of Saving Private Ryan, though the only Steven Spielberg movie I've ever thought was coherent was The Driver; he's otherwise the master of the overdone and anticlimactic. But SPR did not win the Best Picture award. That went to Shakespeare in Love.
I did see that one, and thought it was awful. Tom Stoppard is good for a quirky laugh or two now and then, and The Real Inspector Hound is a terrifically zany play. But the gender-bending stuff gets wearisome, kind of fast, especially when you have Gwyneth Paltry as the female lead. What on earth were Hollywood producers smoking, when they latched onto her as some sort of actress? To say that she's not in the same league with the likes of Claudette Colbert, Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman, Maureen O'Hara, Luise Rainer, Irene Dunne, and others in that time is to say that a little fat kid with a wiffle ball and bat is not Henry Aaron. There are only one or two things she can do, and she's not good at them, even.