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.
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