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