One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

This category seems pretty up in the air if you ask me. With neither of the two strongest Best Picture nominees in contention here, it feels as though this prize could go a few different ways. A similar situation arose last year when Django Unchained, Amour, and Zero Dark Thirty all seemed to have an angle in this race because none of them had a hope of actually winning Best Picture (whose highest contenders were adaptations). I can also envision three of this year's nominees as potential winners, so let's start with the one I am picking (with trepidation) for the win.

Review - American Hustle

American Hustle opens, as one might expect from a movie about scammers and con-artists, with a con job; But not a con job that has anything important to do with the plot. The con job in question is a man's toupée. Spending several meticulous minutes brushing on paste, applying the shabby tuft of a hairpiece, and then elaborately combing over his side hair so that every follicle is in precisely the right place, this man, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), is attempting to con the world at large into believing that he has no bald spot.

American Hustle, the latest from writer-director David O. Russell's career reinvention as a helmer of madcap character pieces, can itself be described like that toupée: A tangled, messy, unruly concealment of a script littered with bald spots, and yet we can't help but stare in enjoyment at the sight of it. That wig, however insubstantial, is a lot more fun to watch than a head of real hair.