Continuing my 2013 Oscar rant, I now turn my attention to the writing category. Sometimes these two categories can reflect the actual year's best movies: Citizen Kane, Pulp Fiction, and Fargo won screenplay awards, even if they didn't win Best Picture awards. And this year, most of the screenplays are good, even if a couple of clunkers made their way into the mix, and some great things were forgotten.Starting with the "original" or "written directly for the screen" category, for some reason, Michael Haneke's French-language screenplay of Amour made the cut, which is exasperating since I hate it. I'm not sure it will win; voters may prefer to wait and give Haneke the Best Foreign Language film award.
On the other hand, I really like John Gatins' screenplay for Flight. I got to hang out with John a little bit last month, and he told me the story of how the stairwell scene with the cancer patient made the final cut, when it's so obviously one of those scenes that would have been cut out of any other script. It's an example of a great Hollywood screenplay, deeply felt, but with all the right elements in the right places.
It would be great to see Quentin Tarantino win another Oscar, if only Django Unchained were a much tighter screenplay. Maybe it reads better on the page that it played on the screen, though. Zero Dark Thirty was my favorite movie of 2012, but I'm not so sure I'd actually vote for its screenplay. My guess is that director Kathryn Bigelow made the final film what it was, and that some lesser director could have made the same material unwatchable. That leaves Moonrise Kingdom, which is the best of the five nominees. But whether it will win is another question. Most people I talk to about that movie seem to have grown tired of it and Anderson's so-called "cuteness."
It seems that Zero Dark Thirty is the current front-runner, though I'm not sure how much momentum the movie has, and it's not clear whether the voters actually like it. But it does deserve something, and this is likely the place it will collect.
Of the not nominated movies, Rian Johnson's Looper was an outstanding example of imaginative, idea-based sci-fi, but it and other genre films apparently weren't worthy of notice.
The (Possible) Winner: Zero Dark ThirtyShould Win: Moonrise KingdomDeserved to Be Nominated: Looper (Rian Johnson), Safety Not Guaranteed (Derek Connolly), The Cabin in the Woods (Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard)
In "adapted" screenplay, or "Based on Material Previously Produced or Published," I really don't much care about Lucy Alibar and Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild, David Magee's Life of Pi, or David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook; it seems to me that the writing on all three movies are among their weakest qualities. And I don't expect any of those three to win, except for that annoying "Weinstein factor," in which their pet movie -- Silver Linings Playbook -- has to win something. So maybe it will be here.
On the other hand, Chris Terrio's Argo is a terrific script, deftly balancing comedy, suspense, and amazing "true facts." (Terrio was another nice writer I got to meet last year; writers are the nicest people.) But I rather think Tony Kushner's Lincoln is the front runner. All the voters know about Kushner's prestigious stage career, and if he can write for the stage, he must be a better writer than all those mere film writers. Not to mention the sheer work he put into Lincoln, making sure all the language was authentic, etc. The bonus is that it actually is a really great script.
Among the non-nominees were, sadly, some of my favorite films of the year: Cosmopolis, Killer Joe, and The Deep Blue Sea.
The (Possible) Winner: LincolnShould Win: LincolnDeserved to Be Nominated: Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg), The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies), Killer Joe (Tracy Letts)
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