The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.
Best Adapted Screenplay
The nominees are:
CODA
Drive My Car
Dune
The Lost Daughter
The Power of the Dog
Seven of the last 11 Best Picture winners and three of the past four have been Original Screenplays, but with the two frontrunners for Best Picture competing in this category, expect that trend to slow this year. Last year’s Best Picture winner, Nomadland, was an Adapted Screenplay nominee, but in a mild upset, it did not win that award. That fact alone suggests that no matter what happens in this category, we could still be in for a surprise when the last envelope of the night is opened.
Another interesting piece of trivia to note, the Adapted Screenplay category traditionally is less open to films not primarily in English than the Original Screenplay category. Since 2000, 13 original screenplays not primarily in English have been nominated, including one in each of the last four years. Meanwhile, in the same time frame, there have been just four Adapted nominees not in English and, prior to this year, none since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007. For the win, no adapted screenplay not in English has won the award, while there have been two Original winners not in English (Talk to Her and Parasite, albeit 17 years apart).
CODA – If this feels like the first time we have talked about writer-director Sian Heder’s CODA in this series, that’s because it is. The little Sundance-movie-that-could is nominated for just three awards, but here’s the thing: It is a shockingly legitimate threat to win all three and walk away the big winner of the night. This is not where any of us thought we would be when the nominations were announced way back when, but awards season is long and has a tendency to be fickle with its frontrunners.
Let none of that – nor any of the online backlash to CODA’s newly perceived frontrunner status – take away from what a wonderful film this is. Adapted from a 2014 French film, Heder moves the action to New England to tell the story of a deaf family and the hearing-able daughter who wants to move to the big city to go to school and become a singer. Heder is able to transcend any high school coming-of-age trappings by focusing on the subtle, everyday details of life for deaf individuals with a hearing family member. It is patient, observant, honest, and ultimately quite sweet.
The Power of the Dog – Somehow, a lot of the discussion around The Power of the Dog has focused on its ultimate twist. To be sure, it is an excellent twist, but that is hardly what the movie is about. In addition, for anyone paying attention, the twist is spelled out quite clearly every step of the way, a fact that becomes even more evident on subsequent viewings. The film is not its ending. No, the strength of Jane Campion’s script comes from the way it arrives at the many destinations it is headed with each of its characters.
Every brief line carries with it paragraphs worth of unspoken subtext, which is what makes this such a marvelous feat of adaptation. In conjunction with the universally stellar performances, Campion is able to translate the book to the page and the page to the screen in a way that increases the subtleties and complexities of each of the main characters rather than condensing them to fit within the film’s runtime. The twist is always coming, but the reason it works as well as it does is because Campion takes the time to make us care deeply about each of these people, whether we love them, hate them, or quietly fear them.
Drive My Car – The first nominee not in the English language in 14 years, Drive My Car is a gargantuan undertaking. I say this not just for the fact of its three-hour runtime but because the film is an adaptation of multiple short stories. While there is a Haruki Murakami short story by the same name from which this script is adapted, screenwriters Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe also pull from other short stories in the same Murakami collection to piece together a grand statement on love, loss, and finding beauty in the uncertainties of life.
Never does the film feel as though it is pulling from multiple sources and creating something of a Frankenstein of a plot. Instead, Hamaguchi and Oe find the emotional truth at the core of the stories and use that to carry the audience through the plot of a famous stage director who is learning to live with the death of his wife, who was prone to affairs. While some movies struggle to find anything to say for much of their two-hour runtimes, Hamaguchi and Oe use every second of their three hours to dive into the depths of their themes.
The Lost Daughter – This is one hell of a first feature screenplay for first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal. You could be forgiven for mistakenly believing Gyllenhaal is already an Oscar-winning performer. She just has that air, doesn’t she? But, in fact, she has been nominated only once, when she lost the Supporting Actress award for Crazy Heart in 2009. Based on the exquisite craft on display in this film, I would not be surprised to see her with an award for writing or directing even before she picks up an acting trophy.
The Lost Daughter is a dark, unnerving film with the guts to say what many others would be afraid to suggest about motherhood. Very little in the story goes the way we might expect it to, with Gyllenhaal zigging where we think she will zag and committing to a deeply flawed, sometimes unlikable protagonist who is nevertheless fully understandable and a figure of empathy, not scorn. All of it requires the deftest of touches, and here, Gyllenhaal reveals she is possessed of that touch.
Dune – We won’t talk about Dune again until we get to Best Picture, which is surprising for two reasons: 1) one would think a film this popular could score an acting nomination in one of the four categories – Oscar Isaac would have been an inspired Supporting Actor choice; 2) it is hard to figure why the only above-the-line category besides Best Picture where Dune is recognized is in Adapted Screenplay, given that this film adapts only half the book and ostensibly has no ending (not to mention the shocking Best Director snub for Denis Villeneuve).
Regardless, the writing here by Eric Roth, Jon Spaights, and Villeneuve is superlative, taking one of the most famously dense popular science-fiction novels and bringing it to the screen in a way that maintains its strangeness while translating it for mass appeal. I said before in this series that Dune is essentially a story of foreign powers battling over the mining rights to a sovereign land. In other words, its basics are kind of bland. But, the trio of writers succeeds by keeping the soul of Frank Herbert’s novel intact and by recognizing that soul as almost unfathomably weird.
The final analysis
Everything I said at the top remains true. This category might tell us everything, or it might tell us nothing when it comes to Best Picture. The fact is that before Nomadland last year, the previous six movies to win Best Picture with an adapted screenplay also won this category. It is also relatively rare to win Best Picture without winning a Screenplay award. That has happened just six times since 2000, meaning about 70 percent of the time, your Best Picture winner will be one of the two Screenplay winners.
How convenient, then, that CODA and The Power of the Dog are neck and neck in both races. As a predictor of these awards, I am being facetious, but as a fan of these awards, I actually find it quite fun. So, what can we go off of? At the Writers Guild Awards, CODA triumphed, but Dune was the only other film nominated for both awards. On the other hand, Heder also won the BAFTA, where the lineup was exactly the same as the Oscars.
So, it’s CODA, right? But, wait. The Power of the Dog took best film at the BAFTAs without winning the screenplay award. This exact scenario played out last year, when The Father won the BAFTA for adapted screenplay, while best film went to Nomadland, then that same dynamic played out at the Oscars. Long term, there is no money in predicting against precedent, and I remain on the fence about Best Picture. However, the evidence in this category is too strong not to predict CODA.
Will win: CODA
Should win: The Lost Daughter
Should have been here: Tick, Tick…BOOM!
Next time: Best Supporting Actor
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