One Category at a Time: Adapted Screenplay

The contest for Best Adapted Screenplay is stuffed with the four leading Best Picture contenders, which makes it rather tricky to anticipate this year. We have a difficult literary adaptation from a popular potential sweeper, a quirky screwball comedy that a lot of pundits seem to be underestimating, a verbose historical drama that glows with eloquent language, and a zingy crowd-pleaser that appears first in line to win Best Picture. Joining them is a scrappy indie whose best shot at winning anything may come in this category (not that it's a great shot).

Review - Life of Pi

Shipwreck survivor Pi Patel has a harrowing story which an interviewer has been told “will make him believe in God”. Ang Lee's bold translation of the Yann Martel bestseller Life of Pi may not quite be able to do that, although it certainly gets you to thinking about such things as religious philosophy. For some, the film could inspire epiphanies about one's own beliefs. For others, not so much. If nothing else, at least it'll make you believe the craftspeople of this high-seas odyssey are gods for creating such divine imagery.

Pi (short for Piscine) is moving from India with his family and the zoo animals they own, intent on selling the creatures and starting a new life in Canada. When a deafening storm sinks the ship and everybody else on board, Pi is left stranded on a lifeboat with no company besides a lame zebra, an excitable orangutan, a hungry hyena, and a ferocious Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. The bulk of the film presents Pi's fight for survival; a test not only of his physical and mental ingenuity, but of his faith as well.