In some years, the best original screenplay category serves as an adventurous refuge from the conservatism of the overall best picture race. While comfy prestige adaptations have duked it out on the other end of the table, the Academy has recently taken advantage of the airier original field to hand Oscars to such leftfield talents as Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her), Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and, last year, Spike Jonze (Her).
This, however, is not one of those years. While the adapted race is being kept unpredictable by its relative softness, its original counterpart looks like a stiff contest between the three arguable best picture frontrunners. Don’t necessarily expect the outcome here to foreshadow the big one, however. This trophy could be the night’s key consolation prize, but which way round things will go is anyone’s guess.
Of the three, The Grand Budapest Hotel currently exerts the loosest grip on best picture and best director, which could make this the obvious place for its admirers to conglomerate. Following The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom, this marks Wes Anderson’s third nomination in the category, with his career tally now sitting at six.
For all his outsider trappings, the 45-year-old Texan is now firmly in the Academy’s club, and many of his peers will now believe he’s due a win. His latest, meanwhile, represents his most Academy-friendly gambit yet: it has the daffy comic energy on which he made his name in the first place, with the wistful nostalgia and distant historical context that enables more po-faced Oscar voters to take it semi-seriously. (Don’t think they can’t spot the Holocaust allegory between the millefeuille layers.) The Academy has a better record of rewarding comedy in the screenplay categories than elsewhere in the race: they like craft to be made plain to them, and the writerly skill behind a perfectly honed verbal gag is pleasingly obvious.
Then again, that line of thinking could just as easily benefit Birdman. The zig-zagging, acidic banter between its gaggle of blustering Broadway loons is hardly shy about drawing attention to itself, while its worked-in allusions to Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love lend superficial intellectual cachet for any voters who prefer their screenplays all, you know, literary and stuff.
That combination of factors made the screenplay by (deep breath) Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo a formidable contender for this award even before key wins from the producers’ and actors’ guilds boosted Birdman’s overall standing in the race. It won the Golden Globe in this category, for starters. Never mind that it’s the clunkiest screenplay here, with its blunt satire tailing all targets in search of one and a surprising amount of tin-eared dialogue slipping in amid the rapid-fire back-and-forth. (“We share a vagina” is a peculiarly awful line, for all its clip-reel ubiquity.) It sounds clever, and that can take a film far in this category.
If Boyhood, by contrast, doesn’t sound especially written at all, that’s because it isn’t. Richard Linklater himself has admitted that the basis of his 12-year coming-of-age study was more of a blueprint than a screenplay – after all, you can only be so prescriptive as a writer when there’s no way of telling how your cast is going to morph from year to year. But it’d be a mistake to assume Boyhood is some kind of magical product of spontaneous improv: rather like Mike Leigh (a regular nominee in this category, though not this year), his method is more to workshop and rehearse dialogue with actors until it feels suitably improvised.
Quite how sensitive voters are to such nuances is open to doubt, but also immaterial: many will vote for Boyhood here simply because they like the result, and not think too hard about the process behind it. And like Anderson, Linklater is also a three-time writing nominee ripe for a first win. (Due to quirky Academy rulings – more on those below – Before Sunset and Before Midnight were both cited in the adapted category.)
Two no-hopers, both missing a best picture nomination, round out the category. E Max Frye and Dan Futterman’s inclusion here for Foxcatcher re-opens the question of whether biographical stories should really count as original screenplays: one presumes they aren’t written without at least a few books being cracked open. (All sequels, meanwhile, are deemed adaptations by the Academy because they feature pre-existing characters. Biopics, apparently, don’t.) Categorisation queries, however, shouldn’t cloud the intelligence, wit and structural daring of Foxcatcher’s script, which inserts sly sexuality and American myth-busting into the ellipses of the John du Pont scandal — tragic material open to more salacious movie-of-the-week treatment.
But, with its frosty ambiguities, the film hasn’t been entirely warmly received by the industry, while Frye and Futterman (a previous nominee in the adapted category for Capote) are presumably grateful that Mark Schultz’s bizarre on-off takedown of the film didn’t scupper this nomination.
Finally, Nightcrawler (forever bound to Foxcatcher, at least in this writer’s mind, by the cadence of its title) is the only nominee here to score in no other category. On the eve of the Oscar nominations, few would have guessed Dan Gilroy’s nippy, nasty news-media satire would be orphaned in this way: it performed robustly in the guild nominations, while Jake Gyllenhaal’s slithery turn as deranged paparazzo Leo Bloom was hotly fancied in the best actor field. Sixth place is a cruel position in the Oscar race, and Nightcrawler appears to have landed there several times over. Which is a long way of saying that the final tally for this one doesn’t tell the whole story: there’s a lot of industry support for this indie, particularly in the Los Angeles belt it savagely covers, and its fans will concentrate here. That won’t be enough for a win; in a less feisty year, it could have been.
Will win: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Should win: Foxcatcher
Hey, where’s ... The Lego Movie? Not to keep harping, but Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s ingenious subversion of franchise logic and hero’s-journey structure won best original screenplay from the National Board of Review. It deserved serious consideration here.
