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| Inside Out is the seventh Pixar film nominated for Best Original Screenplay in the company's history. |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.
Best Original Screenplay
The nominees are:
Straight Outta Compton
The Writers Guild of America handed out its awards last
night – in a somewhat bewildering bi-coastal ceremony, it should be noted – and
as predicted, The Big Short was cited
for best adapted screenplay, and Spotlight
came away with the best original screenplay award. We discussed yesterday how
little the Writers Guild means in terms of predicting the Oscars, but it never
hurts to have more hardware on your shelf to impress voters as they mark their
ballots.
Regardless of the Writers Guild, those two films were always
favored to win their respective screenplay categories at the Oscars, which puts
both in good position to take Best Picture as well. The last Best Picture
winner not to win a screenplay award was Million
Dollar Baby in 2004. The last Best Picture winner not even nominated for a
screenplay award was Titanic in 1997,
which puts nominations leaders The Revenant and Mad Max: Fury Road
in a more precarious position than they otherwise might seem.
Spotlight – I may have a few biases here, to which I will readily
cop. Co-writer-director Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight is my
favorite nominated film and my No. 2 film of the year. As a journalist myself,
it fills me with pride to see depicted the best of what my profession can
accomplish, even if we often fail to live up to that standard. In fact, I think
it happens to be the best movie about journalism ever made – no slight intended
against the masterpiece All the President’s Men. McCarthy is also
among my favorite independent writer-directors and has been since his excellent
first film, The Station Agent.
What McCarthy and co-writer Josh
Singer have accomplished with their screenplay for Spotlight is
nothing less than a feat of journalism itself. They interviewed endlessly,
researched doggedly, and revised relentlessly to portray with the utmost
accuracy and sensitivity the Boston Globe’s quest to expose the depths of the
Catholic Church’s abuse. Their dedication to the truth is like that of the
reporters about whom they are writing because the story is too important to be
anything but honest.
McCarthy, a double nominee this year
in Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, was previously nominated as a
co-writer on Pixar’s Up, which I
believe to be the crowning achievement in Pixar’s storied history. Singer’s
only previous feature writing credit came for The Fifth Estate, another film about the importance of information.
Like The Big Short in Best Adapted
Screenplay, Spotlight is the only
Best Picture frontrunner in this group, and McCarthy and Singer should win this
award in a walk, which is just as well since no other film deserves it more.
Ex Machina – Since 2000, only
three writing teams have won this award. Generally, Best Original Screenplay
goes to a single writer who has boldly expressed a unique vision of the world. Interestingly,
this year, the only solo nominee in this category is Alex Garland for his
sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, which is
nothing if not a bold expression of a unique vision of the world. The film is a
puzzle box that dares viewers to get lost in its labyrinthine web of
psychological games and elaborate misdirection. It is a smart, intricately woven
script that unlike so many others in its genre, trades in intelligent ideas
rather than unintelligible action.
Garland was a novelist in the 1990s
who shot to fame after the release of director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, for which Garland wrote
the rightly lauded and still admired screenplay. This is just his fourth
feature script since that 2002 hit, but each one has explored similar themes of
humanity, science, technology, and what makes us each unique or not. Garland
was something of a surprise nominee, but his inclusion in the category is
warranted and welcome. One only wishes the Academy had found room for this film
elsewhere as well.
Inside Out – Pixar has a
solid history of picking up Best Original Screenplay nominations. Since Toy Story was released in 1995, writers
on Pixar films have nabbed seven nominations in this category, plus a Best
Adapted Screenplay nod for Toy Story 3.
It makes sense as the company has emphasized a story-first approach to filmmaking
since its beginnings. Apart from the Toy
Story trilogy, Inside Out is
probably the company’s most critically acclaimed film. It explores the inner
world of a preteen girl struggling with depression by taking the audience on a
journey through her subconscious, accompanied by the emotions Joy and Sadness.
Co-writers Ronnie Del Carmen, Josh
Cooley, and Meg LeFauve are all first-time nominees for whom Inside Out represents their first
feature screenwriting credit. In contrast, co-writer-director Pete Docter has
been nominated for Best Original Screenplay four times, Best Animated Feature
three times, and Best Animated Short once. He won Best Animated Feature in 2009
as the director of Up. I criticized
the film somewhat upon its release for not taking enough chances or imaginative
leaps within its premise, but the premise itself is so inventive and the world
of the story so fresh and interesting that that criticism seems less valid with
added distance and time.
Straight Outta Compton – Amid this year’s backlash over the lack of diversity in the
Oscar nominations was talk of the Academy nominating only the white writers of
a critically acclaimed, predominantly black film. It seemed to me an odd point
to make then and still does. The writers branch liked the work, regardless of the
race of the writers, but one wonders why a film that speaks so directly to the
black experience in America has four white writers in the first place. I say
kudos to the Academy for acknowledging the story and shame on the producers for
not finding a more diverse group of voices for its telling.
S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus
reportedly began shopping their original version of the story in 2004, a
version with a much narrower focus than the finished film. Andrea Berloff was
later brought in to broaden the focus of the story, and finally, Jonathan
Herman came on board to rework Berloff’s script. Savidge, Wenkus, and Berloff
received story credit for the film, while Berloff and Herman shared the writing
credit.
Though the film mostly avoids the “too
many cooks in the kitchen” vibe suggested by its complicated origins, it relies
heavily on some of the more obvious musical biopic tropes and is overlong. The
nomination is not without merit, but it is likely running fourth or fifth in
the category and will not win unless the Academy is feeling particularly guilty
about its lack of diversity. Even then, awarding the film’s four white writers
for telling the story of a black rap group is unlikely to assuage those
feelings of guilt.
Bridge of Spies – After picking up
three below-the-line mentions on nominations morning, when Bridge of Spies was called out for Best Original Screenplay, I felt
certain Steven Spielberg would be nominated for Best Director and the film
would be a force to be reckoned with in the Best Picture category. While the
film picked up an impressive six nominations, Spielberg was not cited, and the
film is most likely a Best Picture also-ran. What I forgot to consider was how
much the Academy loves Joel and Ethan Coen, given their films are exactly
the right kind of weird – arty but not outré.
The script, however, did not originate with the Coens but
rather co-nominee Matt Charman, who had the initial idea to bring the story of
James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) to the screen. This is just Charman’s second
feature script, while four-time Oscar winners the Coens need no introduction in
the cinema world. They have shared Oscar wins for Best Original Screenplay,
Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, and each has 14
nominations across five different categories. This is their first nomination
for a film they did not direct themselves, and the nomination is probably as
far as this goes.
The final analysis
It may be a race to the finish line for the top award, but
on the way there, Spotlight will pick
up this prize, and I will be ecstatic to see McCarthy with an Oscar. As with The Big Short in Best Adapted
Screenplay, a win here for Spotlight
would signify little, while a loss would be an early indication that something
else will be named Best Picture. The other nominated screenplays range from
solid to excellent, but nothing is in the same league as McCarthy and Singer’s
accomplishment, and that should be enough to carry the day.
Will win:
Spotlight
Should win: Spotlight
Should have been
here: Mustang
Tomorrow: Best Animated
Short
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