One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay is just another in a long line of categories this year that really has me scratching my head. With the absence of any film that has a remote chance of winning Best Picture, the doors are pretty much wide open. Sure, we can sort of (but not completely) eliminate the two contenders without a nomination in the top category, but among the three that do, it's very much anyone's game.

My Award nominations: Original Screenplay

Read about my favourite Original Screenplays after the cut.

Review - Zero Dark Thirty

At 12:30 a.m. on May 2^nd 2011, Black Ops raided a compound in Pakistan and shot dead the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden. It was the culmination of a long, tiring search by the CIA which inspired Kathryn Bigelow's clinical new thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

As fictionalized by writer Mark Boal, the CIA men and women who worked for years to track down the reviled terrorist are amalgamated and personified by the character of Maya (Jessica Chastain), but that's about as fictional as his screenplay gets. The vast majority of it is a straight-laced, doggedly researched piece of cine-journalism, which condenses several firsthand accounts into a tightly-wound docudrama.