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Maybe Spacey thought all the good work and pretty smart film choices were his own forward payments to negate four upcoming decisions. These decisions would prove that American Beauty was the exception and not the rule for Spacey as a leading man.

In 2000, about ten months after his second Oscar victory, he joined fellow Oscar winner Helen Hunt and It Kid of the moment, Haley Joel Osment, in the destined-to-be-despised Pay It Forward. Innocently enough, the film had a well-meaning script that tried to serve as the blueprint for showing humans how to be better to one another. Something went wrong and the film soon was the butt of many jokes. Since I can't blame Joel Schumacher for this one (I wish I could), let's just blame the script that went out of its way to unnecessarily manipulate an emotional response from the audience and was a melodramatic mess. A bit too glossy and small to be thought of as real Oscar bait, it probably still appealed to the actor's desire for a chance to do some "ACT-ING." With a $40 million budget, not enough people wanted to pay for it at all and it only made $33.5 million.

Obviously, Spacey decided to make the logical rebound film and play...Prot, a space alien that might actually just be a mental patient?!? In K-PAX, he teamed up with four-time Oscar bridesmaid, Jeff Bridges, as his shrink, and played Prot with tics galore, which was the showier of the two roles. Likely, the actors and roles would had been reversed if American Beauty had not earned so much gold at the box office and at the Kodak Theater. While it's not exactly one for the record books, K-PAX's gross squeaked past its $48 million budget to $50.3 million.

Next up for Spacey: More potential Oscar fodder. The Shipping News, adapted from a novel Annie Proulx of Brokeback Mountain fame, had Spacey joined by Julianne Moore, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett for a Lasse Hallstrom-directed drama. Despite the box office failure of the $35 million film only making around $11 million, it appeared that a little bit of the old Kevin Spacey was still there and wanted to immerse himself in projects that could be dramatic showcases with high-caliber actors.

More than a year later, it seemed he tried that formula again but with slightly more costly results. For 2003's The Life of David Gale, Spacey played the title character in what was essentially a $50 million civics lesson and anti-death penalty PSA. Ultimately, the film was a bit long on pretentiousness and self-righteousness and too short on box office as it only pulled in a meager $19.6 million. Sharing the screen again with a couple of great actresses (Kate Winslet and Laura Linney), Spacey seemed to continue to be riding the wave of notoriety that Oscar brought. This film not only failed at the box office, it was derided by critics with only 20% of top critics giving it a favorable review according to RottenTomatoes. At least Spacey had the conviction to only star with talented people, even if the dollars earned weren't justifying the dollars spent.

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