Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Screenplay

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Original Screenplay

The nominees are:

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

TÁR

Triangle of Sadness

As far as I can tell, this is just the second time in the history of the Academy Awards that all five nominees for Best Original Screenplay are also Best Picture nominees. The other time was two years ago, when Promising Young Woman beat out Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Sound of Metal, and The Trial of the Chicago 7. We should expect to see this happen more often as long as the Academy hangs on to having 10 nominees for Best Picture, but it will be interesting to watch develop in the coming years.

For as much as Hollywood relies on sequels and franchises and remakes for their box office hits, original stories are the lifeblood of the movie industry. This is where the real innovation happens, where the movies we’ll be talking about in 20 years or even 50 years show up. This is where you get Pulp Fiction, Network, The Apartment, and Citizen Kane, all winners of this award. This is where the future of film scholarship resides.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – How to describe Everything Everywhere All at Once? It’s a comic sci-fi action fantasy drama inspired as much by Saturday morning cartoons as The Matrix. In other words, it’s everything and the kitchen sink. And the whole kitchen. Hell, throw in the whole damn house. You’d hardly notice it given how overstuffed and underbaked this whole enterprise is (I promise I’m going to say some very nice things about the actors in the coming days).

I’ll try to paraphrase some of this film’s many supporters to explain its presence here: They would have you believe it expertly balances the emotional nuances of a sincere mother-daughter drama with its genre-bending universe-hopping action fantasia. They might argue it works as pure entertainment but ultimately earns its emotional catharsis by the end. I don’t think it does any of those things, but I am in the extreme minority on this – or at least, that’s what the film’s fans would have me believe.

The Banshees of Inisherin – Martin McDonagh has three nominations for Original Screenplay from four movies in his filmmaking career. He’s tied with a bunch of people who have three career Original Screenplay nominations, but there are only 10 people ahead of him. In various interviews this awards season, the preeminent playwright has said he’d like to focus more on making movies in the future, as opposed to plays. Which is to say, I don’t expect many of those 10 people to stay ahead of him for much longer.

I love In Bruges, McDonagh’s first screenplay. It’s a fun, brilliant little movie that was also nominated for this award and should have won it (Milk won that year). That said, this is the best work McDonagh has yet committed to screen. From a simple premise – what if two men stopped being friends? – the filmmaker rings out an almost impossible amount of pathos and empathy. With that classically dark Irish humor and an ear for the perfect turn of phrase, McDonagh turns a quiet human drama into an epic tragedy. It’s like a magic trick, and only McDonagh knows how it is performed.

TÁR – I had a chance to read the screenplay for TÁR. The opening page alone belongs in a museum. The scene setting, the detail, the rhythm – it is, in a word, masterful. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Todd Field’s work. He has written and directed three feature films, and he has been nominated for his writing for each one. For his first two films (In the Bedroom and Little Children), he received Adapted Screenplay nominations. This is his first produced original screenplay, and it’s a doozy.

A fascinating thing keeps happening with people when they finally see this movie. Almost to a person, they ask, “Why didn’t anybody tell me this movie was funny?” It’s a fair question. The logline – a world-renowned orchestra conductor is accused of sexual impropriety – doesn’t exactly scream barrel of laughs. But, that’s Field’s genius: to recognize and highlight the black humor in this self-serious world, to prick the pomposity of these artists. What makes the film scary, though, is how real it feels. These artists are out there, as well as politicians, police officers, and many more powerful people, just waiting to use their positions to take what they want, though they have no right to it.

Triangle of Sadness – I am certain writer-director Ruben Östlund appreciates the irony of this film’s three Academy Award nominations. The script could not be more plainly disdainful of the exact kind of people who gather to hand out gold statues to each other. It is a true kick in the teeth to the moneyed elite, a razor-sharp dissection of class, power, and the precarious nature of our social structure. In short, the passengers on Östlund’s superyacht may as well have been Academy voters.

On the heels of Parasite’s Best Picture triumph, in the same year Knives Out and Ready or Not debuted, Triangle of Sadness has been lumped in with The Menu and Glass Onion as part of the de rigeur “eat the rich” trend that has swept Hollywood. That assessment is unfair to both Parasite and Triangle of Sadness. As much as I love the Knives Out movies, Ready or Not, and The Menu, they are mostly content to revel in black-and-white, good-vs.-evil tales of the poor visiting a comeuppance upon the materially wealthy and morally bankrupt. But like Parasite before it, Triangle of Sadness has more on its mind than easy heroes and villains. It is more complicated than that and all the richer for it.

The Fabelmans – With his three nominations this year, Steven Spielberg is up to 23 career Academy Award nominations. This, however, is his first nomination for writing. It makes sense. This is, after all, the story of his life. It doesn’t hurt to have a Pulitzer Prize winner in your corner either. Co-writer Tony Kushner has previous Oscar nominations for Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. He also wrote a little play you may have heard of called Angels in America. Anyway, it’s a helluva pedigree for a coming-of-age story.

The Fabelmans has been unfairly labeled as Spielberg’s love letter to movies and an ode to himself, the latter of which would be unseemly and the former of which just isn’t the truth. In point of fact, there is more “Ain’t movies grand?” sentiment in Damien Chazelle’s chaotic Hollywood tale Babylon than in this film. Instead, what is actually on the page and on the screen is a searing family drama about using art to hide from your real-life problems. It is insightful, honest, and yes, brave of Spielberg to put all of this on film.

The final analysis

The Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) seem to have made the movie of the moment. Just this past weekend, Everything Everywhere All at Once completed an historic sweep of the Independent Spirit Awards. The Daniels also picked up the Writers Guild award for original screenplay while they were at it. This movie has all the momentum to win big on Oscars night, and if that’s really going to pan out, it is definitely going to win Best Original Screenplay.

It has the whiff of the year Green Book won Best Picture – a much-derided victor that I would much rather rewatch than this. Green Book also picked up Best Original Screenplay en route to the big win, beating out the likes of Roma, The Favourite, and First Reformed, each of which is a brilliant achievement that continues to stand the test of time while Green Book … well … doesn’t.

I am not saying Everything Everywhere All at Once will ever linger in that netherzone, but I am saying that someday, people will wonder how the hell The Banshees of Inisherin and TÁR could both have lost Original Screenplay, and they’ll look it up to remember the winner. How satisfied they are by the answer seems likely to be a matter of personal preference.

Will win: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Should win: TÁR

Should have been here: Holy Spider

A note about my favorite snub: Ali Abbasi’s Iranian crime thriller does things with the genre I have never seen before. In addition to being a first-rate tale of a journalist on the tail of a serial killer, it subverts the tropes of the serial killer movie in ways no American film would dare. It is one of the best and smartest screenplays of the year, and one wishes the Academy had taken more of a liking to the film overall.

Next time: Adapted Screenplay