The Oscars 2026? Get ready for Gwyneth Paltrow

The dust has barely settled on the 2025 Oscars. Mikey Madison secured a mightily deserved upset, bagging the Best Actress award for her star-making turn in Anora and marking the Academy’s return to rewarding its ingenues with the biggest prizes of the night. Not to be, yet, for Demi Moore, whose courageous performance in The Substance brought about a new era of critical acclaim for the legend once dubbed a ‘popcorn actress’, nor for Timothée Chalamet, who was beaten by Adrien Brody to the Best Actor gong. But as this year’s Oscar season comes to an end, a challenger already approaches for 2026. Among the guts left over from the bloodbath that is the Academy Awards, one can, in an auspicious act of Hollywood haruspicy, read an augury of the future. The ultimate comeback from the most infamous of Oscar ingenues. A phoenix rising from the ashes of aphrodisiac sex dust. It smells like success. It smells like revenge. It smells like — vagina? 

That’s right. The 2026 Academy Awards are going to be, apropos of nothing, the glorious return of yonic-candlestick-maker Gwyneth Paltrow. She’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin! She’d rather kill herself than let Apple Martin drink a cup-a-soup! She cannot pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a day! And, come Oscars night 2026, she’s going to be a two-time Academy Award winner (I imagine — we haven’t discussed this over bone broth or anything, more’s the pity). The eschatological signs are all there. War films and rumours of war films. Wicked will be destroyed. I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was Gwyneth Paltrow. After a Hollywood hiatus, the Talented Mr Ripley star is all set for a blockbuster comeback in Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie’s fictional story inspired by a real-life table tennis champion, Marty Reisman. Photos from the set show Gwyneth Paltrow dressed to the nines in a red gown, dripping with diamonds, locking lips with her co-star — who just so happens to be a bespeckled Timothée Chalamet. Who doesn’t smell an Oscar? 

I hear your cries of consternation — “But didn’t she —?” Quit acting? Yes, in a move comparable to Michael Jordan leaving the Bulls, the Beatles disbanding after recording Abbey Road, or the ascension of Jesus, Gwyneth Paltrow pretty much left Hollywood behind in 2020 to fully dedicate herself to wellness empire Goop. But that decision was, I hasten to remind you, made in part because she’d literally already bagged the ultimate award. In 1999, at the age of 26, Gwyneth Paltrow (in)famously won the Oscar for best actress after starring as Viola De Lesseps in Shakespeare In Love. To this day, Gwyneth Paltrow’s win remains one of the most controversial wins in Academy history. Then a young blonde ingenue, just one year older than Mikey Madison, she beat out the likes of Cate Blanchett, Emily Watson, and Meryl Streep for the award. But it was the snub of Fernanda Montenegro for her (unquestionably deserving) performance in Central Station that generated the most anger. The ire felt towards Gwyneth’s win back in Montenegro’s home country of Brazil was incandescent. The 1999 Best Actress race was practically an international diplomacy incident. “There was this feeling in the country that she was deeply wronged,” Brazilian film critic Isabela Boscov recently explained to The New York Times. Legendary actress Glenn Close also weighed in, telling ABC news in 2020: “I remember the year Gwyneth Paltrow won over that incredible actress who was in Central Station — I thought, ‘What? It doesn’t make sense’.” 

Much of the controversy was out of Gwyneth’s hands. It is impossible to separate Shakespeare In Love’s dominance at the 1999 Oscars from the juggernaut influence of Harvey Weinstein’s no-holds-barred campaigning strategy. As the mastermind behind Mirimax, the distribution company behind Shakespeare In Love, Weinstein turned the 1999 Oscars season into all out war — calling voters to make sure they received their VCRs, taking out adverts for the film during Monica Lewinsky’s interview with Barbara Walters, secretly badmouthing the film’s main rival, Saving Private Ryan, to publicists. He recruited Hilary Clinton, then first lady of the United States, to host the world premiere in New York. It was nasty. It was, the then LA President of Miramax told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019, “absolutely murderous”. But it worked. On 9 February 1999 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills, Jack Nicholson announced that the Best Actress Oscar had been awarded to Gwyneth Paltrow. The 26-year-old actress, dressed in a baby pink Ralph Lauren dress with her blonde hair swept back into a headache of a bun, took to the stage and delivered what is sometimes heralded as the worst acceptance speech of all time. 

This is unfair. Yes, it’s inconsolably weepy. Yes, she nepo-baby name checks everyone from her ‘soulful partner Joseph Fiennes’ to her Grandpa Buster. But it really isn’t that bad — the moment Gwyneth breaks down in tears thanking her mother, the actress Blythe Danner, is sweet, and she is the first to acknowledge that she feels “undeserving” of the award in such illustrious company — Danner gasps at her mention, Meryl Streep does that wonderful Meryl Streep thing where she clutches her pearls and touches her ear lobe (more Oscars for Meryl, please). Gwyneth Paltrow had become one of the most famous people in the universe before her Saturn’s Return. At least she didn’t hand her chewed-up gum to her significant other. Paltrow thanks Weinstein for his campaigning early on in the speech, a moment that is now difficult to watch after his horrific history of rape and sexual assault is common knowledge. Who can say what the members of the audience knew of Harvey Weinstein back in 1999, but Gwyneth — who alleged that she was sexually harassed by the producer at the age of 22 — would later become an integral source for the New York Times story that first exposed his crimes. 

The backlash to the win was immediate. “I felt a real pivot on that night because I felt like up until that moment everybody was kind of rooting for me in a way,” Paltrow would later reflect on the Call Her Daddy podcast in 2023. “And then when I won, it was like too much, and I could feel a real turn.” She also revealed that her father, Bruce, was suffering from a debilitating illness while his daughter was accepting the most prestigious prize in Hollywood. “I remember the British press being so horrible to me because I cried. And they didn’t necessarily know that my father was dying of cancer.” Bruce Paltrow passed away in 2002. The Oscar and the public outcry left in its wake left the actress with something of an identity crisis — what else was she supposed to do? Win another one? We can’t all be Frances McDormand. Not only that, but it might have taken winning acting’s biggest award to realise that she could probably take or leave the career path, actually. Reflecting on the award to Bruce Bozzi on the Quarantined with Bruce radio show, the actress admitted: “I think that when you hit the bullseye when you’re 26 years old and you’re a metrics driven person who, frankly, doesn’t love acting that much as it turns out, I sort of felt like, well, now who am I supposed to be? Like, what am I, what am I driving towards?” There would be more iconic roles for Gwyneth in the wake of her Oscar win. In 2001, she sported an all-timer bob in The Royal Tenenbaums, in 2010 she sang a mashup of “Singing In The Rain” and “Umbrella” on Glee and in 2011, a turn as an early victim of a deadly plague saw her consciously uncouple from her scalp, face, and cerebral cortex. 

Gwyneth’s most famous role of the 21st century was probably Pepper Potts, Iron Man’s wife in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Her part in the highest-grossing film franchise of all time was famously one that left her both politely bemused and completely nonplussed. Addressing the crowd at a career retrospective, she described her relationship to Marvel with genuinely refreshing apathy: “To be honest, I stopped watching them at some point. I’ve never seen End Game. I can’t keep track of who’s what. But I probably should at some point.” It’s been charming to see Timothée Chalamet admit that he wants to be “one of the greats”, doing away with the irony-poisoned sprezzatura that typically characterises award season. But I, for one, trust Gwyneth completely when she says she never saw what was technically her most successful movie. She had other things to do. 

For example: selling lamps made out of baguette. Rather than compete for the biggest prizes in cinema, GP founded Goop from a London kitchen table in 2008, introducing the world to such revelations as: a $28,500 sex dungeon chaise longue, jade eggs for pelvic floor strengthening (legally unsubstantiated), a leather bag designed specifically for transporting your watermelons, rectal ozone therapy and psychic vampire repellant spray. Famously, there were also candles crafted to smell like her vagina (“roses wrapped in suede”), her orgasm (“tart grapefruit, neroli and ripe cassis berries blended with gunpowder tea and Turkish rose absolutes”) and her prenup (“grapefruit, bergamot and raspberry). Thank God she did. Who else was going to tell the public that we all have “insidious yeast infections”, that water has feelings, or that the best way to kill off the parasites living in our gut is to drink nothing but goat’s milk for eight days? But labial steaming aside, it’s easy to forget that — bored as she may have become with the job — Gwyneth Paltrow is a bloody good actress. Whether she’s playing one of history’s great poets in Sylvia, giving audiences a new vocabulary for “what could have been” in Sliding Doors, or starring as a severed head in Se7en, she’s a performer of undeniable charisma. We should count ourselves lucky that she’s returning to the screen.

But would Gwyneth even want another Oscar? Understandably, her relationship to her statuette is a complicated one, overdetermined with decades of cultural politics. In a 2019 interview for Vogue’s 73 Questions series, Paltrow announced that she used her Academy Award as a doorstop, and was then forced to clarify that she was joking — once again demonstrating her criminally underestimated comedic mind. But in 2005, she rather more candidly admitted that the award “freaked her out” and that she kept it stashed away in the back of a bookshelf. She had never been able to “feel really good” about the Oscar, she told the Sydney Morning Herald, and the whole thing left her feeling “sort of embarrassed”. It was a reminder of a “tough time” in her life, Gwyneth reflected, something that “brings up weird, traumatic feelings”. Reflecting on how her life had changed after winning the prize, the actress explained to Self in 2013 that she felt “less threatening now that I’m 40 and not 26-with-an-Oscar”. With the Marty Supreme campaign already kicking off, it begs the question — what about a Gwyneth Paltrow who is 52 with two Oscars? What if, like King Arthur from Avalon, she returned when we needed her most? We should feel not threatened but thankful.