After Shakespeare in Love, Sliding Doors and Emma, you have to give Gwyneth Paltrow credit for knowing her niche in Hollywood. Combining American notoriety with a studied British accent, she promotes small movies with her celebrity and receives in return status as a more highbrow actress than her talent deserves. Take the Golden Globes. It is deeply disappointing, but not surprising, that Her Royal Blandness Gwyneth Paltrow finally nabbed an award. Show off a credible English accent in enough small, high-to-middle-brow movies, and you're bound to win something, if only a Golden Globe for Best-Actress-in-a-Comedy-Or-Musical-Who-Gets-Parts-On-the-Strength-of-Her-Dialect-Coach.

Paltrow's skills as an actress have clearly never been the point. Mostly, reviewers have talked of her choice in men. Or her looks. After a string of unwatched performances in forgettable movies - anyone remember Hush? Or Jefferson In Paris? Or Great Expectations? - Shakespeare in Love may have given Paltrow an identity of her own. She now, officially, has the chance to be somebody other than Brad Pitt's ex-girlfriend. Or not. Probably not. Put 100 monkeys in a room for 100 years with 100 typewriters, and maybe one monkey will type a good word about Paltrow's acting. Notice how everybody who sees S. in L. raves about Dame Judi Dench as an imperiously bitchy Queen Elizabeth? Dench is onscreen for all of seven minutes, but she blows Paltrow out of the water. In the old-fashioned term, Dench is an actor. She has what used to be called star power. In contrast, Paltrow is what my film studies friends in college called a vacuum. That means she is what reviewers call mediocre.

Her "award-winning" performance as Elizabethan teenybopper Viola de Lesseps never matches co-star Joseph Fiennes' manic intensity as the young Shakespeare. Certainly, Paltrow didn't get much to work with in the way of character- Shakespeare in Love is, well, all about Shakespeare and how he's in love-but her Viola is nothing more than a succession of charming facial expressions. There's a whole lot of emotion onscreen, but no real sense of a coherent character who is doing the emoting.

There's this moment in S. in L. (I really did like the movie, apart from Gwyneth) when Paltrow performs a Shakespearean monologue and Fiennes appears completely engrossed, almost enraptured by it. The scene plays off an interesting conceit - we watch Shakespeare, for the first time, find himself being treated like Shakespeare. But apart from a playwright's joy in hearing his own words, there's no observable reason for Shakespeare's bliss. Paltrow's Viola sounds excited and manages to speak all the words (and in the right order too!), but she never sets the archaic words on fire. Paltrow might as well have been reciting from an article in People for all the depth of meaning she reveals in them.

Which is why I have a problem with her continued presence/non-presence in smaller movies. I could care less about her appearances in movies like Great Expectations (which starred Robert DeNiro, Anne Bancroft and Ethan Hawke, mind you, and still wasn't all that big. You see what I'm saying? Gwyneth Paltrow can jinx any movie, because SHE DOES NOT ACTUALLY MATTER TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC AS AN ACTOR). If she could just stick to roles requiring zero talent, personality or charisma, we wouldn't have this bizarre disjunction between career success and actual talent/popularity. She would still languish in mediocrity, but at least her flaws wouldn't be so obvious.

The question for me has always been: How does she continue to get parts? She has hardly been, as Harvey Weinstein has said, "the muse of Miramax." (I'm amazed that he could say it with a straight face.) Movies are expensive propositions, but unlike many mediocre actresses who continue to work, Paltrow is clearly not a box office draw. And while actors don't have to be huge box offices draws in order to get parts in Miramax films, most of those actors are far more interesting than Gwyneth Paltrow. And can do a better job at bringing in audiences.

Take Great Expectations, its marketing featuring photos of a nearly-naked Paltrow. If appearances in People magazine had created audience interest, Gwyneth Paltrow should have made that film a huge hit. But Great Expectations disappeared without a trace. Partially, I suspect, it failed because the female target audience for Great Expectations was more interested in the men who accompany Gwyneth than in Gwyneth herself. And since Paltrow's cele-brity has nothing to do with her movies, people who follow her career have no need to pay $8.50 to see them.

In a (very) unscientific poll, Paltrow ran neck-and-neck with Calista Flockhart in the Actresses-We-Hate contest. People, especially women, have always disliked Gwyneth Paltrow. In a magazine article from a few years ago, one of Paltrow's high school classmates explained that Paltrow, in fact, has always been both admired and detested for the unforgivable perfection of her life.

Clearly, Paltrow got her start in acting through her parents. She is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and producer Bruce Paltrow and went to a tony girl's school in Manhattan and to acting camp in the summers. She got her start at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a summer stock company which has long been a haven for Hollywood actors who want to do some stage acting, Blythe Danner among them. Anyone who thinks Paltrow won that role at WTF through her acting skills probably also believes that Tori Spelling was totally deserving of that spot on Beverly Hills 90210.

Paltrow, like Spelling, is living proof that life is unfair. That some people just don't have to pay any dues whatsoever. That there is gain without pain. That children of famous people are, in fact, often more attractive than the rest of us. She has walked every step on the path to celebrity on a plush red carpet, and I, like many Americans, like my celebrities to suffer. Or at the very least, wait a few tables. At least they should have a drug problem or abusive lover. There's just something so... dilettante-ish about Paltrow. Or did I mean debutante-ish? She bears more than a passing resemblance to her character in S. in L., a rich girl moon- lighting as an actress before her marriage to a wealthy creep.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, actresses who couldn't count on audience interest in their films got ditched. They would star in a couple movies, and either they'd succeed or they would quietly disappear. This Darwinian process, now apparently abandoned, has produced the great actresses of our times. Whatever process has replaced it produces Great Expectations. Paltrow has gotten second, third, fourth and fifth chances. And while I bear a special grudge against Gwyneth Paltrow for reasons that were made clear in the previous paragraph, she's not the only example of this problem. In part, I think much of the undeniable mediocrity in American entertainment today is due to the reasonable, but mistaken, assumption that tabloid notoriety and audience interest-not to mention creative ability- are inherently linked.

Paltrow, like Monica Lewinsky or Soon-Yi Previn (or is it now Soon-Yi Allen?), belongs properly to the cover of People, not on an episode of Inside the Actor's Studio. And like those two other unlucky women, her public identity is no longer her own but rather a reflection of certain American social/sexual obsessions with famous men. Like Anne Heche, she was famous as a girlfriend long before true celebrity hit her as an actor. In interviews with Paltrow before The Breakup (and after, sadly), she talks about him all the time. Where most people have a personality, she had Brad Pitt. Thus Paltrow can neither act nor "just be herself" onscreen. If the ideal actor uses the body as a blank canvas on which to paint a character, she remains, after all these movies, a blank canvas. She's a model, a generically beautiful woman upon whom viewers can impose their dreams, not an actor. Real actors, even bad ones, fill up that huge screen. They do not leave it emptier. I'm not sure Paltrow can ever be an actor. The American public likes Paltrow as a figurehead, not as a charismatic presence.

In one of those everybody-uses-the-same-idea-at-the-same-time incidents which have plagued the theaters this year (c.f. Antz and A Bug's Life), the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama went to yet another beautiful young actress who starred in yet another lavishly-costumed period film featuring Queen Elizabeth I (with the same Joseph Fiennes). Except that Cate Blanchett was actually very good. The contrast between Blanchett and Paltrow is almost painful. Blanchett delivers a luminous, nuanced performance in Elizabeth and her personal life goes mostly unreported. Meanwhile, entire films are financed on the strength of the sex life of this supposed actor who couldn't act her way out of a specially reinforced high-quality cardboard gift bag from Barneys.

In a just world, the continued success of Gwyneth Paltrow would be a non-issue, and this article would never have been written. That this article was written at all is a tribute to the ease with which we confuse tabloid notoriety (and highbrow taste in scripts) with actual talent.

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