From Oscar Winner to Pepper Potts

Let’s say you win an Oscar award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Arguably, it was a cheapie win in a long-since forgotten movie which rode a huge marketing campaign to garner awards, yet has not withstood the test of time like other epic and more-deserving films of that year (Saving Private Ryan). An Oscar award is an award, right? So where do you go from there?

If you’re Gwyneth Paltrow, who won a Best Actress Oscar in 1999 for Shakespeare in Love, your path goes like this:

Continue to ride Oscar Buzz in smaller films with less success (Talented Mr. Ripley, Bounce, Royal Tenenbaums);

Take a quick comedic turn (Shallow Hal);

Star in increasingly smaller movies, dissipating from public consciousness (Proof, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sylvia).

And now, the kicker. Variety announced last week that Paltrow has signed on to play Virginia “Pepper” Potts in the upcoming Marvel Comics film, Iron Man.

Now I’m a comic book junkie and have really enjoyed many of the recent Marvel films (the Spider-Man duo and X-Men trio in particular). And yes, Oscar winner Anna Paquin also played Rogue in the X-Men movies, and two-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe played Norman Osborn in the Spider-Man movies. Oscar Winner Cliff Robertson (Ben Parker) had a smaller role in Spider-Man, but it's a key role in his origin story.

But Pepper Potts? Opposite Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark? When your character is a personal assistant to a playboy industrialist (with a “secret” attraction to your boss)?

Ugh. Running with Scissors, indeed.