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 Original Screenplay
The nominees are:
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
The Worst Person in the World
This is perhaps best known as the category wherein the fun, hip movies have a chance. This is where you get your cool solo nominations for movies like In Bruges, The Lobster, Knives Out, or Bulworth (a longtime personal favorite of mine). This year, the cool-kid slot goes to Best International Feature nominee The Worst Person in the World, a movie the Academy’s Writers Branch rightly recognized as a work of tremendous depth and insight.
However, the frontrunner for the award this year is one of the ultimate film nerd cool kids writing a movie about the ultimate cool kid. So, we start there.
Licorice Pizza – Paul Thomas Anderson is probably the single most heralded modern American filmmaker without an Oscar. I’m a golf fan, so I liken it to being the best golfer never to win a major. He’s widely recognized as an immense talent, he’s incredibly popular, he is always impressive, but there is one piece of hardware missing from the mantle. In Anderson’s case, that means 11 nominations without a victory, including five screenplay nominations (three Original, two Adapted).
PTA is a triple nominee this year for his ode to youth and young love in the ‘70s, Licorice Pizza. You will hear the word “breezy” thrown around a lot about this film, and that descriptor is apt. Certain passages are downright lackadaisical in telling the story of the budding friendship/pseudo-romance between Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana (Alana Haim). This is not Anderson’s best film by far, but it is absolutely one of his most pleasantly rewatchable, with writing that focuses less on plot than on creating characters we just want to hang out with. In that effort, it succeeds wildly.
Belfast – While Anderson has admitted to writing Licorice Pizza primarily based on the misadventures of a friend of his, Kenneth Branagh has been upfront about saying Belfast is his story. That personal experience shines through in every sharp detail of this lovely little coming-of-age movie. Branagh hits a lot of the traditional beats one would expect to see in a story like this, but the specificity of the observations is what makes this film special.
With his nominations in this category and as a producer in Best Picture, Branagh becomes the first person in Academy history to be nominated for awards in seven different categories. Among his eight nominations, he has been nominated twice for Director and once each for Picture, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, and Live Action Short. Like Anderson above, despite all the accolades and recognition, Branagh has never taken home an Oscar.
The Worst Person in the World – Director Joachim Trier and frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt have captured lightning in a bottle with their screenplay for The Worst Person in the World. Simply put, it is magical, but perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a feat of magical realism. Though the film forays into the surreal and the fantastical, it never feels less than fully honest about what reaching the age of 30 without accomplishing anything of note feels like.
One of the film’s most talked-about gambits is the frozen time sequence during which Julie (Renate Reisve) runs through the streets of Oslo to meet her lover as the entire world stops around them. This sequence is rightly celebrated, but from a writing standpoint, I would call the “Is this cheating?” montage an even greater achievement. It evokes the same feeling through the simple magnetism of two people realizing they have a deeper connection than they ever imagined. Two people chatting at a party never felt so high-stakes nor as impossible to look away from.
Don’t Look Up – The discourse around his film has been disappointing, to say the least. Writer-director Adam McKay did not help himself with either his too-revealing Vanity Fair interview or his social media reactions to criticism of this film. I did not agree with much of that criticism either, but where grace might have been the best option, McKay, in the parlance of the internet, chose violence. Never mind all that, though. Here he is with his third straight directorial effort nominated for Best Picture, and in my opinion, this is the best film of the three.
Sharing story credit with David Sirota, McKay’s screenplay traffics in the kind of angry, poison-pen satire we have come to expect from the writer of The Big Short and Vice. This time, he is operating in a lightly fictionalized universe, which allows him to take even bigger swings at his targets – a do-nothing government, a profit-driven business class, a blithely ratings-driven media, and the blissfully ignorant public. No part of the American experiment is left un-skewered, and like his previous two films, at the end, there is nothing to soften the blow of realizing just what kind of world we have created.
King Richard – Take this nomination as evidence of just how much the Academy loved this movie, since the screenplay by first-time credited writer Zach Baylin is perhaps the least of the film’s virtues. This is not to say the script is bad, per se, but it certainly falls into a number of traps common to sports biopics and comes off as if it were never too concerned about avoiding them.
Focusing on Richard Williams’ (Will Smith) relationship with his wife and daughters through the prism of their single-minded determination to become a tennis dynasty, the script occasionally stacks the deck in favor of making Richard a modern day prophet. As an audience, we know history will prove him right, but what he is proposing to people in the film is self-evidently bonkers. The script never truly questions him and, in fact, often goes out of its way to humiliate and shame his doubters. The true story is obviously great, but its handling here could have been subtler and more even-handed.
The final analysis
My heart wants to say Anderson has this all sewn up. He is deserving. It is time. This is the kind of film that often is recognized for its writing. He has won any number of precursors, including the BAFTA over three of his competitors in this category. My heart is all in on PTA. But, my head has questions. Questions like: Will Anderson’s clumsy handling of a racism controversy (or the oddly racist jokes in the film itself) hurt him? Why did Anderson lose the Writers Guild Award to McKay? Is this just the right film at the wrong time?
That said, Belfast is the most likely second choice and its loss to Licorice Pizza with the British Academy suggests less support than we would have imagined. Don’t Look Up has the WGA award, but it has little else aside from the respect of McKay’s peers, if not the critics. The Worst Person in the World probably goes home the same way all those other cool-kid nominees did: empty-handed. That leaves King Richard, which has shown no strength for the win, though the film is clearly beloved.
So, with all that said, I come back to Licorice Pizza. It is absolutely vulnerable here, but I just don’t see an obvious path to victory for any of the other nominees. PTA finally gets his Oscar.
Will win: Licorice Pizza
Should win: The Worst Person in the World
Should have been here: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Next time: Best Adapted Screenplay
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