My Award Nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay

No offense to any of the hardworking screenwriters who slaved away adapting some previous work into a movie that came out last year, but this category is just so... desolate. By far the weakest field I've seen since I started writing about this stuff. I looked up more Adapted Screenplay FYC posts on various Oscar blogs than ever before, because the Oscar frontrunners just weren't doing it for me.

I suppose that's a blessing in disguise, though, as it forced me hunt down some true gems that I probably would have missed otherwise. So for what they are, here are my five Best Adapted Screenplay nominees for 2014. Here's hoping 2015 has more to choose from.

Review - Gone Girl

“You don't know what you've got 'til it's...” the tagline for Gone Girl ominously forebodes. That common phrase takes on twisted new meaning in this hotly-awaited thriller from David Fincher, which opens with the voiceover of a man confessing how he wishes he could know what his wife's thinking; pick her brain; see what's on her mind – all worded with a queasy skull-cracking metaphor designed to unsettle us right off the bat. He truly won't know what he's got until she's gone, and when he finds out, he'll wish he never asked.

Like the vanished woman to whom the title refers, Gone Girl has quite a lot – too much, in fact – on its mind. Based on the best-selling pulp novel by Gillian Flynn (who also adapted it for the screen), it's a movie that aspires to be many movies at once, but does not fully succeed at being any of them.