The Academy has a tendency to award respected novelists and playwrights who deign to work in film. I suppose to legitimize their own artform by hitching to others? Sometimes it is for adapting their own work, as in Peter Shaffer for
Amadeus, Ernest Thompson for
On Golden Pond, Christopher Hampton for
Dangerous Liaisons, Alfred Uhry for
Driving Miss Daisy, Michael Black and
Dances with Wolves, John Irving for
The Cider House Rules, and Florian Zeller and
The Father. They may even reward novelists adapting work not their own as with Larry McMurtry adapting Annie Proulx’s
Brokeback Mountain. All of that would seem to bode well for Kazuo Ishiguro. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and
Living is his first Oscar nomination. Though Ruth Prawer Jhabvala got a nomination for adapting his novel
The Remains of the Day (1993) for James Ivory.
Living is a reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s classic
Ikiru (1952). Is the pedigree of a Japanese-born English novelist anglicizing an original Kurosawa going to be enough to overcome the fact that
Living is likely the least-seen of the five nominees?
No Pulitzer Prize winners had anything to do with
Top Gun: Maverick and its screenplay is hardly one of the chief elements one thinks of when decoding its popularity and box office success. For a belated sequel the five-man team credited with the script do an admirable job (pun intended there, Iceman). It used to be almost unheard of for teams of three or more screenwriters to even be nominated for Oscars much less win, but with Spike Lee and his three co-writers winning for
BlacKkKlansman, Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash for
The Descendants, and Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson & Fran Walsh winning for
LOTR: The Return of the King in the Adapted category and Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly & Nick Vallelonga for
Green Book and Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu and his three cohorts for
Birdman on the Original side, while it is still not exactly common it isn’t unheard of, either. Though as you can see from that list, the film’s directors were involved in all of those Oscar-winning screenplays and it should be noted that
Maverick’s director, Joseph Kosinski, is not among the credited.
Speaking of three-man writing teams, Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson & Ian Stokell are credited with this newest adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front, and Berger
is the director. The original 1930 Best Picture winner was nominated for its screenplay as well, though it lost to the prison break drama
The Big House. While this remake seems to be a cinch to win Best International Feature Film, it will likely not win here nor repeat as Best Picture.
Writer/director Rian Johnson has become a known Hollywood commodity in the past fifteen years or so, and while cool indies like
Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and
Looper built him a fanbase, his turn at the Star Wars table with
Episode VIII: The Last Jedi nearly killed it. He came roaring right back with the fun throwback all-star whodunit
Knives Out, which netted him his first nomination for Original Screenplay. And though he lost to
Parasite it put him back in good graces. Even though the sequel
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery only retains the Benoit Blanc character, that is enough to make this one count as an Adapted Screenplay. Unlike the original the sequel rather split its support so it seems unlikely that it would win here.
Which leaves
Women Talking. Miriam Toews’ novel was adapted by the film’s director, Sarah Polley. She began her career as a child actress in Gilliam’s
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) and transitioned well into more adult roles in films by Atom Egoyan (
Exotica and
The Sweet Hereafter), Michael Winterbottom (
The Claim), David Cronenberg (
eXistenZ), and Doug Liman (
Go) and she is known to Horror fans for starring in Zack Snyder’s reboot of
The Dawn of the Dead (2004). Although her acting career was successful she moved into her true passion: filmmaking. Her debut as a writer/director was the wonderful
Away from Her (2006) which got the great Julie Christie a well-earned Best Actress nomination and Sarah her first for adapting Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” (The Coen Brothers won that year for
No Country for Old Men). She followed that triumph with
Take This Waltz (2011) and her very interesting and personal documentary
Stories We Tell (2012) about her own family’s secrets.
Women Talking was shut out of any of the acting categories and for Polley’s direction, but it did manage to make the Best Picture cut and while it has less-than-no chance of winning the biggest prize of the night Polley may well hear her name called. I sure hope she does.
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