One Category at a Time: Best Original Screenplay

Just like in Best Adapted Screenplay, this race feels like a tight one, except that it comes down to two scripts instead of all five nominees. I gotta tell ya, as much fun as true suspense on Oscar night can be, I'm having a rough go of predicting Best Original Screenplay lately, batting less than 0.500 over the last seven years.

Part of it is that the two main industry precursors are doing just as poorly when it comes to prefacing the Academy (which isn't their job, of course, and thank God for that). The WGA and the BAFTA have each anticipated the eventual winner only half the time in this decade, so maybe I'm looking at the wrong precursors.

My Award Nominations: Original Screenplay

The Academy's judgment that Moonlight and Loving be considered adaptations certainly thinned things out in this field (while I normally don't hold myself to taking Oscar's cues, it appears in both cases to be have been a reasonable decision), but on the plus side it freed me up to welcome a bubble contender or two into the fray. My five favourite Original Screenplays of the year are:

Review - Sicario

Cops and cartels, midnight raids and public shootouts, blood vendettas and hidden agendas, and a whole lot of dead bodies literally walled up in a house of horrors. If you told me all of this sounds like it belongs in a trashy detective novel, I'd probably agree. If told me it all sounds like it belongs in a trashy movie I'd say, “Hold the phone! Who says the movie has to be trashy?”

And of course, it isn't. French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve insinuates and executes all of these familiar genre tropes with hitman-like precision in Sicario, delivering one of the most cringe-inducing, butt-clenching, excruciating films of the year... And I mean every one of those in the best possible way.

Working from a twisty screenplay by actor-turned-writer Taylor Sheridan (Sons of Anarchy), Villeneuve has crafted an excellent thriller that's every bit as refined (if not more so) as the glossy biopics and period pieces that angle for adult dollars at the multiplex every fall. Along with 2012's Prisoners and last year's Enemy, Sicario further embosses his reputation as a filmmaker capable of elevating even the pulpiest story material with his surgical attention to form and construct.