OVP: Best Adapted Screenplay (2010)
The Nominees Were...
Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy, 127 Hours
Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich, Toy Story 3
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, True Grit
Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini, Winter's Bone
My Thoughts: With the widened Best Picture field, the screenplay categories have started to become a bit redundant, and no more so than in 2010, when nine of the top ten nominees all received a nomination for writing. As a result, I'm going to try my darndest to make sure this not a carbon copy of our later Best Picture writeup.
I'll start by going to one of our most discussed films of the bunch, True Grit, celebrating our sixth nomination in the writeups, and for the film, yet another loss (it's worth noting that the film didn't win a single Oscar despite its double-digit nomination count, though it has of course taken an OVP win). We've gone back and forth on the film, mostly headed to the negative, and even though it has the brilliant Coen Brothers behind it, I have to say that the script is going to be more in the negative column.
The Coen Brothers are very hit-and-miss on adapting works-sometimes, like No Country for Old Men, it works perfectly, but here they seem to be boxed in by the structure of Charles Portis's novel. It doesn't help that the story doesn't have their trademark twists, turns, and macabre sense of humor. The film is a straight-forward western, a beautiful one due to Roger Deakins, but one that rarely goes beyond its structure to try something new. Even when it finds time for the cleverness of Jeff Bridges and his pitch perfect delivery, they seem to be retreading on some of their many past creations. It occasionally seems as if the Dude has decided to go back in time and start horseback-riding. Which is fine, but it's just not good enough for this category.
Toy Story 3 is the exact opposite, a beautifully-structured movie that knows exactly the direction it wants to take. I loved the way that it somehow managed to find familiar themes (being tossed aside, growing older, questioning loyalties amongst friends), and make them appear fresh and warm. The story is fairly basic as far as animated films go, but the dialogue sparkles, as Lotso Love and Ken add delicious new angles for the toys. The film is brimming with wonderful bits, like being overplayed with (after two films of complaining about being underplayed with, it was nice to see that the shoe went the other way), and the film's ending is just terrific. It is helped dramatically by its source material, but that's true of almost any of these films, so I think it's a bit of a wash, and the ending is so heartfelt. It's so sparse in the way that it gives just a few glimpses of these characters being brought back to their life's purpose, and then bittersweet, not giving us our cake to eat and keep. It's a message that few mainstream animated films allow, and I have to give the writers mad props for not leaving us an ending tied with a bow.
The Social Network enters a similar level of excellence, and while it doesn't have the shared history that all filmgoers have with Toy Story, it has the razor-sharp wordsmith skills of Aaron Sorkin to carry it along. The film is brimming with instantly quotable lines: "you better lawyer up asshole," "what part of Long Island are you from, Wimbledon?""we all know marlins don't weigh three-thousand pounds, right?" and crackles with character development throughout the story. The film never lags (never), despite it being filled with familiar plots (betrayal of friends, multiple scenes in court), and that's largely due to the care that Sorkin brings to his characters and the way that he elegantly shows Mark's descent from a man with friends and no power to a man with no friends and all the power, and somehow makes a film that perfectly captures the spirit and disillusionment of Gen Y, despite him missing being a member of the generation by a good twenty years.
127 Hours is one of those movies that I feel just got in because it was a Best Picture nominee, as it's hard to make an argument for its screenplay. It's not just because of the lack of characters, but it's also about the lack of growth, and the sense that Franco is improvising, which is a credit to Franco, but not to the screenplay. When it doesn't seem like he's improvising, the film gets thrown into a series of repetitive gross-out scenes (drinking urine, multiple scenes involving bodily fluids, actually), and doesn't really go anywhere. It was a noble experiment, and occasionally works, but not when it comes to its script.
The final nominee is the only movie we haven't discussed previously, Winter's Bone. This is the sort of movie (its similar predecessor Frozen River is another) that grows and grows the further you get from it, and that's partially because of the complicated script. Granik and Rosellini aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty, showing us the seedy underbelly of this small Ozark town and the meth-addled recipe of young Ree Dolly's kin. The film is helped in a bravura performance by our leading lady Jennifer Lawrence (as well as some smart supporting choices), but the script is what pushes it forward, giving us loose ends to go with the resolution, enough so that we wonder not only about what happens in the rest of the film, but also how frequently this situation turns its head in real life.
The Coen Brothers are very hit-and-miss on adapting works-sometimes, like No Country for Old Men, it works perfectly, but here they seem to be boxed in by the structure of Charles Portis's novel. It doesn't help that the story doesn't have their trademark twists, turns, and macabre sense of humor. The film is a straight-forward western, a beautiful one due to Roger Deakins, but one that rarely goes beyond its structure to try something new. Even when it finds time for the cleverness of Jeff Bridges and his pitch perfect delivery, they seem to be retreading on some of their many past creations. It occasionally seems as if the Dude has decided to go back in time and start horseback-riding. Which is fine, but it's just not good enough for this category.
Toy Story 3 is the exact opposite, a beautifully-structured movie that knows exactly the direction it wants to take. I loved the way that it somehow managed to find familiar themes (being tossed aside, growing older, questioning loyalties amongst friends), and make them appear fresh and warm. The story is fairly basic as far as animated films go, but the dialogue sparkles, as Lotso Love and Ken add delicious new angles for the toys. The film is brimming with wonderful bits, like being overplayed with (after two films of complaining about being underplayed with, it was nice to see that the shoe went the other way), and the film's ending is just terrific. It is helped dramatically by its source material, but that's true of almost any of these films, so I think it's a bit of a wash, and the ending is so heartfelt. It's so sparse in the way that it gives just a few glimpses of these characters being brought back to their life's purpose, and then bittersweet, not giving us our cake to eat and keep. It's a message that few mainstream animated films allow, and I have to give the writers mad props for not leaving us an ending tied with a bow.
The Social Network enters a similar level of excellence, and while it doesn't have the shared history that all filmgoers have with Toy Story, it has the razor-sharp wordsmith skills of Aaron Sorkin to carry it along. The film is brimming with instantly quotable lines: "you better lawyer up asshole," "what part of Long Island are you from, Wimbledon?""we all know marlins don't weigh three-thousand pounds, right?" and crackles with character development throughout the story. The film never lags (never), despite it being filled with familiar plots (betrayal of friends, multiple scenes in court), and that's largely due to the care that Sorkin brings to his characters and the way that he elegantly shows Mark's descent from a man with friends and no power to a man with no friends and all the power, and somehow makes a film that perfectly captures the spirit and disillusionment of Gen Y, despite him missing being a member of the generation by a good twenty years.
127 Hours is one of those movies that I feel just got in because it was a Best Picture nominee, as it's hard to make an argument for its screenplay. It's not just because of the lack of characters, but it's also about the lack of growth, and the sense that Franco is improvising, which is a credit to Franco, but not to the screenplay. When it doesn't seem like he's improvising, the film gets thrown into a series of repetitive gross-out scenes (drinking urine, multiple scenes involving bodily fluids, actually), and doesn't really go anywhere. It was a noble experiment, and occasionally works, but not when it comes to its script.
The final nominee is the only movie we haven't discussed previously, Winter's Bone. This is the sort of movie (its similar predecessor Frozen River is another) that grows and grows the further you get from it, and that's partially because of the complicated script. Granik and Rosellini aren't afraid of getting their hands dirty, showing us the seedy underbelly of this small Ozark town and the meth-addled recipe of young Ree Dolly's kin. The film is helped in a bravura performance by our leading lady Jennifer Lawrence (as well as some smart supporting choices), but the script is what pushes it forward, giving us loose ends to go with the resolution, enough so that we wonder not only about what happens in the rest of the film, but also how frequently this situation turns its head in real life.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes combine their screenplay category, so we were only given two adapted nominees (127 Hours and The Social Network) to go with the three original screenplay nominees, with The Social Network taking the cake. The BAFTA Awards gave Winter's Bone a shrug while keeping the other four (they're not usually into the American independent scene), choosing instead The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the Noomi Rapace version), and giving Sorkin another piece of hardware. Finally, there were the WGA's, which threw out Winter's Bone and Toy Story 3 (the WGA Awards have some weird eligibility issues and these may not have actually been eligible for a trophy), and instead went with the just-miss Best Picture nominee The Town and the gay dramedy I Love You Phillip Morris. And yes, Sorkin won again.
Films I Would Have Nominated: As you may be able to tell, while I don't particularly know that I would have included all of the Top 3, there are two that I'd rather readily discard from this lineup, so I would want to include Never Let Me Go, a vastly underrated film that will break your heart and has just enough dark twists to go with its sterling performances by Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield to merit inclusion, and Scott Pilgrim once again. I know some would scoff, but Scott Pilgrim's script is perhaps its best asset-twisted, insanely funny, and snappy enough to warrant a thousand quotables that are ingrained in your head upon leaving the theater.
Oscar's Choice: Oscar went with the precursor stampede and welcomed Aaron Sorkin to a club you'd assume he'd already been invited into, but alas had not.
Oscar's Choice: Oscar went with the precursor stampede and welcomed Aaron Sorkin to a club you'd assume he'd already been invited into, but alas had not.
My Choice: Sorkin. In another year I would have had a tough call between TS3 (silver) and Winter's Bone (bronze), and would have been far more furious about Scott Pilgrim's lack of inclusion, but all that melts away when you get to witness a true top-of-his-game achievement like the work that Aaron Sorkin brings to life in The Social Network.
Do you agree that The Social Network was inevitably the best, or was there another script you felt trumped Sorkin? How would you have ranked the remaining contenders (for the record, I had True Grit in fourth and 127 Hours in fifth)? And considering the great quotes in them both, what is your favorite line in The Social Network and Scott Pilgrim?
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