Oscars 101: Best Adapted Screenplay

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Coming off of my Original Screenplay high, Best Adapted Screenplay looks especially sparse this year.  While some strong candidates are mixed into the nominees, the writing branch has chosen to safely stay squarely within its box of acceptably high-brow films, constricting the category to one of its dullest lot of films within recent memory.  This year's Adapted Screenplay nominees are:

American Sniper
The Imitation Game
Inherent Vice
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

There had been rumors circling before the nominees were announced that Guardians of the Galaxy was a sure choice to get a Best Adapted Screenplay nod.  While I did dismiss this as too radically mainstream for the Academy, I cannot help but wish that it was true, because Guardians of the Galaxy has one of the freshest, funniest and all around most unique scripts of any movie this year.  It found the proper balance of comedy, drama and action while never losing sight of its end-game or incredibly entertaining characters.  Pair that with a surprisingly weak crop of actual nominees, and it's an absolute shame that it never stood a realistic chance in the category.

American Sniper - I've come to terms with the fact that American Sniper is not one of the best movies of the year a while ago.  It was undoubtedly a great one, right down to its Mark Boal-styled script, but honestly doesn't even register in my top thirty films of the year, given how unprecedentedly outstanding 2014 was for movies.  And despite ending on such a perfectly somber note that not a single person in the sold-out showing that I went to spoke a word until they were out of ear shot of the auditorium, it just can't measure up to the nominees that were more than just serviceable - more than just very good.

Chris Kyle isn't interesting because he's written that way, he's interesting because Bradly Cooper made us take interest in him.  In fact, the most interesting things about his life - the controversial, polarizing, politically incorrect media magnet that he became after the war - wasn't addressed at all.  And in the increasingly negative atmosphere it exists in, criticisms against its script are most often and most loudly  repeated.

The Imitation Game - One of the likelier candidates to win the award tomorrow, The Imitation Game found a way to balance three competing narratives about three radically different time periods in one extraordinary man's life with a perfect eye to what was important and when.  Rather than fighting one another for screen time, they augment the surrounding segments, illuminating key details and important information right before or after they are addressed in the other segments.  In this regard, acts like an Academy friendly version of Cloud Atlas or Oculus.

The trouble for the film comes in when trying to attribute who was truly responsible for this narrative entanglement's ultimate success on screen.  Was it the script that wrote and arranged the scenes in such a way as to be increasingly edifying, or was it the director who took a hopelessly tangled script and made it work as a film (and with both aspects of the film nominated for Oscars, whichever one they choose to honor is anybody's guess)

Inherent Vice - The challenge with adapting a novel to the big screen has as much to do with how it's rendered as a script as it does what kind of text is being adapted in the first place.  The majority of literature is, and always has been, introspective: focused on the inner thoughts, feelings and reactions of the characters when faced with often extraordinary circumstances.  The majority of films, however, are extroverted: showing, rather than telling, what is happening from an exterior vantage point.  This is why I feel that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas failed as a film (an unpopular opinion, I know) and why One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest drew such heat from the novel's enthusiastic readership.

Thomas Pynchon, the author of the film's source material, is perhaps one of the most intensely extroverted writers to ever live.  And while that's certainly no indication of a film's merits on its own, it does start it off fighting an uphill battle over whether or not audiences will "get it" or if it will even makes sense on its own at all.  Granted, the Academy has taken a shine to it, but the question remains whether or not it will be enough to take on more traditionally conceived films based upon more readily understood texts.

The Theory of Everything - The way that I go on about it, people might start to think that I disliked The Theory of Everything.  I do not.  It was a remarkably entertaining and well-made film that was far from the sappy biopic that I had initially taken it to be.  And beyond that, it obvious has struck a chord within the Academy, as evidenced by its branch-spanning support of the film.  But, like I said about Best Actress nominee Felicity Jones, its a comparatively weak nomination in the field that could have easily be put aside for a more interesting and well-crafted nominee.

The real strength of The Theory of Everything lies in leading man Eddie Redmayne and director James Marsh, not in Anthony McCarten's script.  It's an emotional story, to be sure, but not an especially interesting one, nor one with sweeping events and memorable dialog.  It is, in short, a fairly average script that is only ever serviceable to the needs of the film.

Whiplash - So intense is its group of supporters that I cannot rightly throw Whiplash out of the running for anything, especially in such a comparatively open category.  If other films earn just middling levels of support, Whiplash's devoted following may very well prove to be enough to propel their given favorite to Oscar gold.

The script grants equal weight to both halves of a dysfunctional, and abusive creative partnership.  The director compels the protegee to achieve greatness, even at a monumental personal and physical cost.  In turn, the protegee derails the director's best laid plans, coming to an explosive head in not just one, but two separate climaxes.  The writing is memorable, insightful and thoroughly energizing, but risks being perceived as an actor's movie, rather than as a writer's one, losing out on support by those who think J.K. Simmons carried the weight of the film on his shoulders.

Safe Bet:  The Imitation Game

Long Shot:  Whiplash

Longer Shot: Inherent Vice

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