Shakespeare in Love would go on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench), and Best Original Screenplay. In 1593 London, William Shakespeare is a sometime player in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and poor playwright for Philip Henslowe, owner of The Rose Theatre. Shakespeare is working on a new comedy, "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter". Suffering from writer's block, he has barely begun the play, and is further distracted by attempts both to seduce Rosaline, the mistress of Richard Burbage, owner of the rival Curtain Theatre and to convince Burbage to buy the
Oscar bait was set. Independent-film mogul Harvey Weinstein sought prestige for his productions through Oscars; it culminated in a 1998 Best Picture for "Shakespeare in Love", another costume drama. Similar strategies to "The Deer Hunter" brought Weinstein's company another Best Picture in 2010 for "The King's Speech", starring Colin Firth, who got his start in Merchant Ivory's 1980s films. Use of the term "Oscar bait" in the media began to increase in the mid-1990s to a 2004 peak, after which it has remained stable. A study by Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke, two sociologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),