According to Gwyneth Paltrow, it’s not easy being a Hollywood It girl. One day, you’re dating Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck; the next, the public has it out for you. While appearing on the podcast Call Her Daddy, the Goop entrepreneur recently shared that she could pinpoint the moment that she first felt the masses turn on her. According to Paltrow, it all began the night she won the best actress Oscar for Shakespeare In Love in 1998.

“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 told Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper. “And then, when I won, it was, like, too much, and I could feel a real turn.”

Paltrow does maintain that her somewhat shocking win over stiff competition like Meryl Streep in One True Thing and Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth was not solely to blame for the sudden shift in public opinion. The actor turned mogul believes that her emotional acceptance speech also played a factor in the public’s coldness towards her, especially with the Brits. “I remember I was working in England a lot at the time…and I remember the British press being so horrible to me because I cried,” Paltrow said. “I was 26, I cried, and people were so mean about it.”

Wearing a pink satin gown, Paltrow thanked the other nominees in her category—her “friend” Blanchett, “the greatest one who ever lived” Streep, Fernanda Montenegro, and Emily Watson—the studio Miramax (and its now disgraced and incarcerated president Harvey Weinstein), Shakespeare In Love’s director John Madden, her costar Joseph Fiennes, and her agent Rick Kurtzman. She didn't begin to cry until she thanked her family, specifically her mother: actress Blythe Danner. “I could not have been able to play this role if I had not understood love of a tremendous magnitude. And, for that, I thank my family—my mother, Blythe Danner, whom I love more than anything.” 

At the time of her win, her father, director Bruce Paltrow, was undergoing treatment for cancer. From the podium, Paltrow said her father “had surpassed insurmountable obstacles this year” and that she “loved [him] more than anything in the world.” (Bruce Paltrow ultimately died from oral cancer in 2002.)  She ended the speech with a dedication “to two young men who lost their lives very early:” her ex-lover Harrison Kravis, who died in a car accident at the age of 18, and her cousin Keith Paltrow, who died of cancer at the age of 23. 

Despite her sincere speech, Paltrow says now that she felt a “big energy shift” after that experience and had to change the way she moved through the world. She had to “learn to be less openhearted and much more protective of myself and filter people out better,” she said.

Of course, Paltrow is not the only Hollywood starlet who has felt the warm embrace of the public, only to be cast out into the cold shortly after winning an Oscar. But after Paltrow’s spectacular 2023 ski trial—where she was awarded $1 after a court decided that she was not liable in an accident—it seems that she’s decidedly back in the public’s good graces. The masses may be fickle. But thankfully, like Paltrow and Marvel movies, they seem to forget a lot.