And the nominees for Best Original Screenplay Are:
And the nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay Are:
And the Oscars should go to...
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY SHOULD WIN:
Full disclosure: I haven't seen The Messenger
What a choice this is to make. We have Tarantino's lightning-quick rat-a-tat in Inglourious Basterds, Up scribe Pete Docter's heartfelt whimsy, the Coen Brothers' wacky question mark A Serious Man, the taut, crackling suspense of Mark Boal's The Hurt Locker, and what I'm sure is a terrific example of skillfully stringing words together in Final Draft in Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman's (those are some names, huh?) The Messenger
I'm having an incredibly hard time decided between Boal and Tarantino. On one hand, my frayed nerves want to give The Hurt Locker a round of applause. On the other, The Hurt Locker is light on words (not that dialogue is all that goes into a screenplay, of course), while Tarantino's script is an elaborate, swirling narrative chock-full of crackling dialogue and surprise LOLZ. But on yet the other hand (I've got three), The Hurt Locker is the better movie...
I've literally changed this five times.
....
.......
...........
Make that six.
I think.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY WILL WIN:
This is one of this race's few tough calls. Don't quote me on it, but...
Inglourious Basterds has proven a fairly divisive movie--it seems to have nearly as many detractors as it has fans--and The Hurt Locker has the most support overall, especially in the all-important Best Picture category. Plus, it won the WGA award, and for the vast proportion of the Academy voting body who are dumb as a box of hair and have no idea what's going on, they'll defer to the screenplay experts.
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY SHOULD WIN:
Let's eliminate the most obvious first. Geoffrey Fletcher had a chance to improve upon Precious: Adfa;lsdkfj;lksdfj;l's source material, and chose to "honor" (eyeroll) Sapphire's book. NEXT.
Neill Blomkamp (who also directed) and Terri Tatchell did a great job of crafting an alien-helmed roller-coaster ride with District 9. Nick Hornby created a script that is by turns wonderfully moving and laugh-out-loud clever with An Education. And Jason Reitman (sigh) and Sheldon Turner took what is widely said to be a mediocre novel and spun it into cinematic gold.
But for sheer wordsmithery, nothing comes even tangentially close to
You want laugh-out-loud funny? Well here it is. Jesse Armstrong's In the Loop, a "fictional" comedy about a joint British-American partnership to dupe us all into supporting the Iraq War, is nothing but words, words, words, the kind that move one trillion miles an hour and are literally combusting with hilariously wielded profanity. Comedy writers, if they're smart, will study the tic-tic-BOOM cleverness of this screenplay with a magnifying glass before ever writing another word. It's FUCKING GENIUS SEE IT NOW.
However, In the Loop can say, in the words of one of its characters, "Fuckety-bye-bye!" to Oscar glory because...
WILL WIN
Firstly, nobody's even seen In the Loop, and more importantly, like The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air won the WGA award. And fair enough, because it's lovely.
But seriously? SOMEBODY WROTE THIS AND THAT SOMEBODY IS JESSE ARMSTRONG AND HE SHOULD WIN AN OSCAR:
"Within you 'purview'? Where do you think you are, some fucking regency costume drama? This is a government department, not some fucking Jane fucking Austen novel! Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your 'purview' and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock!"
Please also note that that is delivered in a Scottish accent.
I mean...
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