Countdown to the Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The nominees are:

American Fiction

Barbie

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

The Zone of Interest

Alright, let’s dive into this. It is absolutely absurd that the Academy reclassified Greta Gerwig’s and Noah Baumbach’s script for Barbie as an adapted screenplay. Every other awards body on earth rightly acknowledged it as an original work. The Writers Guild, in nominating Barbie, nominated it as an original screenplay. The BAFTAs nominated it as an original screenplay. Where the hell did this decision even come from?

It basically comes down to the Academy considering the Barbie doll a piece of intellectual property that Gerwig and Baumbach have adapted for the screen, but this is a ludicrous interpretation of the concept of adaptation. Point me to the piece of Barbie IP where she delivers a monologue about the plight of modern womanhood. Point me to the Barbie universe jokes about The Godfather, Stephen Malkmus, and the Snyder Cut. I look forward to viewing the piece of previous Barbie material where the doll identifies that impermanence is inherent in the beauty of life.

Of course, none of those things exists because Gerwig and Baumbach did not adapt any Barbie IP. They used the world of Barbie to tell a completely original story. It’s like saying the Birdman team “adapted” the New York theater world. Yeah, it existed before, but it’s being used in a whole new way. It applies a ridiculous purity test to the concept of “originality,” as though if every element of a story did not spring fully from your imagination, you cannot claim to have had an original idea.

Judd Apatow pointed all of this out on social media in the immediate aftermath of the decision and took a lot of heat for what I think is a pretty uncontroversial opinion. You had waves of writers and critics leaping to defend the Academy’s decision, making truly galling leaps of logic to support an awards body they generally make careers on disagreeing with.

If I were to posit a theory about the situation, it is that Barbie die-hards and Gerwig stans, of which there are many of both, are desperate for Gerwig to win an Oscar, and Original Screenplay seemed like the most likely path there. This was all even before she was left off the Best Director slate. However, in their fervor, the twin fandoms became annoying to a large segment of folks who are sick of hearing about it. This situation presented a perfect opportunity for that segment of people to tell the fans to sit down, shut up, and just deal with it.

So, fine, some people were annoying and some people were annoyed, but you can’t just throw logic out the window because it’s convenient to your cause. Barbie existed before the movie. Sure. No argument here. But, let’s ask ourselves what else existed.

The Spotlight team at the Boston Globe and their fact-based newspaper reporting definitely existed before Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer won an Original Screenplay for the movie Spotlight.

King George VI had a stutter and a speech teacher who helped him through that long before David Seidler won the Original Screenplay Oscar for The King’s Speech.

You may be shocked to learn Harvey Milk was a real person, who lived a well documented public life, before Dustin Lance Black used all of the written, video, and other archival materials to adapt the politician’s story into Milk, the winner of Original Screenplay in 2008.

I can do this all day, and if those people who think Barbie is so clearly an adapted screenplay want to have a conversation about true stories being considered original, then I’m here to have it. But, I haven’t heard anyone saying that because it’s not about that. It’s not about logic or really even caring about the Academy Awards. It’s about some grumpy folks who were all too excited to put some fans in their place.

As far as what the Academy was thinking? Damned if I know. With that, I present four films adapted from books and Barbie.

American Fiction

Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s first film is sharp, witty, and genuinely moving in ways that surprised me. It has been sold as a broad satire of the literary world and the inherent messiness in telling “black stories.” It certainly has all of that, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the family drama at the center of this film that lends the story much of its emotional weight. I’ve heard Jefferson speak about some of the changes he made to the Percival Everett novel on which this film is based, and all of the adjustments sound prescient and well considered. This is a smart film, though I wish it dug a little deeper.

Barbie

You already know how I feel about this one. Original or adapted, nobody could have made this work better than Gerwig and Baumbach. This was an impossible task that others in Hollywood had taken on before and failed to crack. Gerwig and Baumbach cracked it wide open in a way that has resonated with millions of people across the globe and that will be talked about for years to come. 

This is Gerwig’s third screenplay nomination and fourth nomination overall. She was previously nominated for Adapted Screenplay for the marvelous Little Women and for Director and Original Screenplay for Lady Bird. Baumbach also has three screenplay nominations and four nods overall. He previously was nominated for Original Screenplay for The Squid and the Whale and for Marriage Story, for which he also received a Best Picture nomination.

Oppenheimer

Now, this is a feat of adaptation, Christopher Nolan adapting the massive J. Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus into a coherent, entertaining film. Perhaps you have heard that Nolan wrote the screenplay in the first person from Oppenheimer’s point of view. That’s a pretty amazing gambit, one that you can try when your films have grossed billions of dollars and your wife is your producer. But, that’s really window dressing. The substance is that Nolan has taken a 700-page book and turned it into a taut, gripping thriller about the folly of man. He still can’t write women, though.

Nolan has previously been nominated twice for Original Screenplay for Memento and Inception, in addition to five other nominations spread across the Picture and Director categories.

Poor Things

In the movie business, it’s good to have a niche. Right now, no one is doing period comedy with serious social themes better than Tony McNamara. From his Oscar nominated original screenplay for The Favourite, which he co-wrote with Deborah Davis, to the television show he created, The Great, to this, McNamara is just fully in his element. Somewhere in there, he also found the time to write the better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Cruella movie, also starring Emma Stone. McNamara’s smart, funny, and insightful script for Poor Things was based on the Alisdair Gray novel of the same name.

The Zone of Interest

The Martin Amis novel that gives Jonathan Glazer’s film its title sounds really interesting. It doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the movie Glazer made – apart from the general setting – but it sounds like a fascinating read and perhaps I will get to it one day. 

It is fascinating that in a year with so much discussion around the Barbie screenplay awards placement, Glazer just quietly slipped into Adapted for a largely original story. But, because there’s a book everyone can kind of point to, no one gets too upset. Anyway, the story Glazer does write is bone-chilling and brilliant. Glazer, who is also nominated for Best Director, is a first-time nominee this year.

The final analysis

This category is shaping up as one of the most interesting this year. In most years, with a Best Picture contender as strong as Oppenheimer, the screenplay award would just go to that film. But, one thing about Nolan’s films is that he is known as such a director that his writing is often either undervalued or overlooked. I would also add that for all the wonderful things Nolan does, writing is maybe not his greatest strength. And, as wonderful a feat of adaptation as Oppenheimer is, it still features some clunky, on-the-nose dialogue and those woefully underdeveloped women.

All of which is to say: The door is open. So, let’s speculate. American Fiction actually feels really strong here because the Academy clearly likes this movie and will want to find a way to reward it, and this is the most logical place.

Lingering good will over her Best Director snub could propel Gerwig (and Baumbach) to the win here for Barbie, but frankly, that didn’t help last time. Gerwig missed out on a much-deserved Director nomination for Little Women, too, and still did not pick up the screenplay Oscar. This despite Little Women being one of the finest and most daring adaptations of the century and Oscar winner Jojo Rabbit being truly embarrassing.

As for Poor Things and The Zone of Interest, the former is seen as much more of a director’s and actors’ film, while the latter, as silly as it is, may get dinged for a lack of dialogue.

It’s not exactly a safe move to bet against the Best Picture frontrunner here, but my gut is telling me American Fiction is the one to go with.

Will win: American Fiction

Should win: (abstain out of protest)

Should have been here: All of Us Strangers

A note about my favorite snub: My favorite film of the year, Andrew Haigh’s adaptation of the Taichi Yamada novel Strangers is simply stunning. It is one of the most powerful and emotionally perceptive films I have seen in quite some time, and it is one of the great misses of this Oscars season that this film did not get more love in the industry.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Adapted 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 Adapted Screenplay

The nominees are:

All Quiet on the Western Front

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Living

Top Gun: Maverick

Women Talking

Let’s go back to 2007 (you’ll see why in a moment) and consider the source material for the last 15 winners of Best Adapted Screenplay. In order, they were: novel, novel, novel, nonfiction book, novel, memoir, memoir, nonfiction book, nonfiction book, play, novel, memoir, novel, play, movie. That’s six novels, three nonfiction books, three memoirs, two plays, and a movie. 

CODA, last year’s winner of Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay, was adapted from a French film called La Famille Bélier. It was just the second time in history the winner in this category had been adapted from a previous film. The first time: 2006, when Infernal Affairs adaptation The Departed brought home the hardware.

This is important because as the media world becomes more diffuse and studios look for IP to bring to the screen from worlds they never considered, the source material for these nominees is likely to become more eclectic and, almost by accident, more interesting.

This year, Women Talking is the only traditional book-to-screen adaptation of this group. All Quiet on the Western Front certainly comes from the famed novel but features wholly invented sequences and is more than a little inspired by previous film adaptations of the material. Living is an adaptation of an original Akira Kurosawa film, Ikiru, hoping to follow in the footsteps of CODA and The Departed.

Then, you have Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, both sequels to popular first films, oddly considered adaptations because they use characters from their predecessors when in fact they are wholly original stories. Only twice before has a sequel film won Adapted Screenplay: The Godfather Part II in 1974 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003. In both instances, however, the adaptations themselves came from novels, not the previously produced films in their respective franchises. 

This all means Top Gun: Maverick and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery are in position to make a little history if either can pull off the upset in this category. But first, they’ll have to take down some pretty serious competition.

Women Talking – This was my No. 1 film of the year, and I believe it was unjustly ignored by many branches of the Academy where it should have been a strong awards contender. Off the top of my head, the score, the cinematography, the costume design, and the direction by Sarah Polley all should have been a part of the conversation. When we get to Supporting Actress in this series, I’ll have even more to say. But, the two places it is properly recognized are in Best Picture and here in Adapted Screenplay, where it is the presumed frontrunner.

It deserves that status, both for the elegant storytelling and the killer speeches that make up the bulk of this film’s runtime. Writer-director Polley turns what could easily be an academic exercise into a treatise on empowerment and self-determination. She is mostly faithful to the novel, itself based on real incidents of abuse that took place in a Bolivian Mennonite community, but she structures the events so that the abuse we witness is never lurid or exploitative. The opening title card refers to the events of the film as “an act of female imagination.” The same words could apply to Polley’s masterful script.

All Quiet on the Western Front – This is what I wrote two months ago when I named All Quiet on the Western Front the eighth best movie of 2022:

It takes a certain amount of courage to adapt one of the most famous and popular novels of the 20th century. Even more courage to choose one that has already been adapted into one of the most acclaimed and best loved movies of all time. And still even more to cut out large chunks of the plot and insert your scenes and ideas into a story many know by heart. This is the courage it took for German director Edward Berger to bring All Quiet on the Western Front to the big screen.

This adaptation, co-written by Berger with Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokewell, is a truly remarkable achievement. By making the changes it does from the Erich Maria Remarque novel, it manages to make you forget about anything outside of the movie. You are not thinking about the novel. You are not thinking about previous adaptations. You are in the moment with these characters at all times. It is a brilliant gamble that pays off splendidly. Ironically, by straying from the text, Berger exemplifies the themes of Remarque’s novel better than we have ever seen and better than we are ever likely to see again.

Top Gun: Maverick – I have seen the criticisms of this nomination. I have seen the refutations of that criticism. I am neither bothered nor surprised that Top Gun: Maverick is a nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay. That said, the film’s screenplay is a little silly. The whole thing is obviously jingoistic, which comes with the territory, but the refusal to name a specific enemy stands out as a conspicuous marketing maneuver more than an essential element of a great script. There is a lot of corny dialogue, which you might expect out of this kind of throwback action movie, and that’s all fine, too. 

My biggest issue is with the structure, which is excruciatingly repetitive and forces the characters to play out about four endings when one would have done. Every sequence plays out thusly: Maverick tells his superiors what needs to be done; they say he can’t do it that way; he does it anyway and proves them wrong. Rinse and repeat. I get that it’s part of the DNA of these kinds of movies. I find it just as fun to watch as anybody else. But, best writing of the year, it is not.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery – I love Rian Johnson, and I have enjoyed every movie he has made. In a film universe where Christopher Nolan is constantly praised for his puzzle-box filmmaking, I would argue Johnson is actually the writer doing the most interesting and complicated things with the mystery genre. I hope he keeps making Benoit Blanc movies for as long as Netflix will fund them.

At each twist and turn of the story, Johnson reveals another layer of his titular Glass Onion. It is one of the smartest scripts of the year and absolutely benefits from repeat viewings. At the halfway point, Johnson pulls the rug out from under us in a way that is shocking but also makes perfect sense, recontextualizing everything we have seen up to that point. Then, he does it again in solving the mystery at the end. It would be a lot to ask a writer to pull that off successfully even once, and he does it twice in a span of about 45 minutes. All I can say is: Give me the next Benoit Blanc mystery.

Living – If pressed, I would call Ikiru one of the 25 greatest films ever made. I think it is Kurosawa’s best. Seven Samurai and Rashomon are brilliant, of course, but Ikiru is the most compassionate and human Kurosawa ever got. Living never quite reaches the heights of its forebear – what could? – but this adaptation by famed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro maintains much of that first film’s empathy for the people trapped by bureaucratic systems and its righteous fury over a world that could be so much better if we would just let it.

This is a fascinating choice of adaptation for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ishiguro, whose novels have been adapted into well received films but who has written just three feature screenplays in his career. This is his first in 17 years. One can only imagine that the 68-year-old Ishiguro saw something in the life of Ikiru’s aging main character that he felt the need to explore. This is a quiet, gently humorous script about doing the most we can with the time we have, and perhaps only Ishiguro could have made such a grand story his own.

The final analysis

Only three films ever have won this award without a Best Picture nomination – The Bad and the Beautiful in 1952, Sling Blade in 1996, and Gods and Monsters in 1998 – so we can pretty safely eliminate Glass Onion and Living from contention. The nomination for Top Gun: Maverick feels more like a reward for the film’s massive box office than recognition of its writerly merits, so I think it comes down to two.

Women Talking is the presumed frontrunner and will win this award unless there is a tremendous groundswell of support within the Academy for All Quiet on the Western Front. It could happen. There are shades of the year Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit snuck up in the final days and took this award from Greta Gerwig’s far superior Little Women. This would not be on the level of that travesty, and Jojo Rabbit probably doesn’t belong in the same conversation as Little Women, Women Talking, and All Quiet.

Berger’s film is excellent and his team’s adaptation is wonderful and would be a deserving winner in any other year. But against Polley, this is no contest. Polley was previously nominated for this same award in 2007 for Away from Her but lost to the Coen Brothers for No Country for Old Men. If she wins, it will be one the highlights of the night to see the actress turned writer-director on stage with the award. I hope it happens. For now, I am betting it will.

Will win: Women Talking

Should win: Women Talking

Should have been here: Pearl

A note about my favorite snub: It wasn’t exactly a banner year for adaptations, and a lot of the films I watched that were adapted from other material were either just fine or actively bad. But, going by the letter of the Academy’s law, the Pearl character in Pearl is pulled from X, so that makes this Ti West/Mia Goth script collaboration an adaptation. And, boy, what an adaptation! Everything we see deepens the themes of X while making Pearl a richer, more interesting character than fans could have dared to dream.

Next time: Supporting Actor

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay

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