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.

Busy Guild Weekend: WGA, CAS, MPSE, MAHS

We're into the final stretch, and this long weekend saw a smattering of the remaining guilds announce their winners for the year (only the CDG is left).

The most contested of them would have to be the Writers Guild of America Awards, where the three presumed Best Picture heavyweights Moonlight, La La Land and Manchester by the Sea all squared off against each other for Best Original Screenplay. Moonlight won that distinction, giving me just a bit more comfort in sticking with it for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, although this gives us no further hints in the nail-biter between La La Land and Manchester for the Original Screenplay prize.

With both Moonlight and Lion absent from the guild's Best Adapted Screenplay category, Arrival was able to capitalize. What a wonderful surprise it would be if it could translate its Critics Choice and WGA cache into Oscar gold!

The prize for Documentary Screenplay went to Robert Kenner's Command and Control, which had been shortlisted for the Oscar but failed to make the final five.

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:

WGA Nominees, plus thoughts on Hidden Figures

The Writers Guild of America sounded off today, and the Original Screenplay category is loaded with contenders that are probable Oscar nominees. Mind you, that's because two of them (Moonlight and Loving) will be competing in the Adapted Screenplay category for the Academy Awards. Accordingly, the WGA's Adapted Screenplay lineup is fleshed out with some contenders which stand little chance of landing a corresponding Oscar nod.

Original Screenplay
HELL OR HIGH WATER, Taylor Sheridan
LA LA LAND, Damien Chazelle
LOVING, Jeff Nichols
MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, Kenneth Lonergan
MOONLIGHT, Barry Jenkins, Tarell McCraney

Adapted Screenplay
ARRIVAL, Eric Heisserer
DEADPOOL, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
FENCES, August Wilson
HIDDEN FIGURES, Allison Schroeder, Theodore Melfi
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS, Tom Ford

Thank God Moonlight was moved to this category for Oscar purposes, because this (with the notable exception of the superb Arrival) is a weak group. Here's my question: Does Moonlight now being considered an adaption disqualify the original playwright Tarell McCraney from what would otherwise be considered a nomination-eligible writing credit on the screenplay? The move might have guaranteed an Oscar for Jenkins, but effectively robbed McCraney of the nomination. I'll be interested to see how AMPAS rules.

'Spotlight' and 'Big Short' win WGA Awards

Not much more to comment on in these races. The screenplay categories are probably the biggest locks of the night. The documentary prize featured none of this year's Oscar nominees, which was good news for Alex Gibney's Scientology doc Going Clear.

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With only a handful of weeks before the Oscars, now is the time for me to start formulating some predictions, and I'll start with what may be the surest lock of the year, Best Original Screenplay.

It's hard to imagine the prize going to anything but the former Best Picture frontrunner Spotlight. Though it's no longer favoured to win the top award after The Big Short's momentum shifting PGA win, Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer's dense journalistic procedural will surely be given its due here.

The nearest challenger -- a distant second despite being a perfectly respectable option -- is probably Matt Charman and the Coens' austere political quasi-thriller Bridge of Spies, being the only other Best Picture nominee in the field.

PGA Preview + My Award Nominations: Original Screenplay

Tonight all eyes will be on the Producers Guild of America, who have matched the Academy all six years of the expanded Best Picture era so far. Pundit logic suggests that Spotlight (my prediction) is the only movie that can survive the rigors of the preferential ballot, although I wouldn't put it past them to be sufficiently impressed by the gargantuan production that was The Revenant. Spotlight is a relatively small and very talkative movie after all; Not the type that usually wins Best Picture, but I'll try to remain optimistic.

While the producers' decision may ultimately end the perceived race for the Academy's highest honour, the race for my own awards is just getting started. Each weekend from now until the Oscars I'll be publishing my own list of personal preferences, starting with Best Original Screenplay.

Spotlight Shines Bright, but Oscar Frontrunner?

After stirring up a lot of talk at Telluride and TIFF in September, most markets finally got to set eyes on Tom McCarthy's Spotlight. Gripe as I may about sluggish release schedules, this one was worth the wait.

The journalistic docudrama about the Boston Globe's Pulitzer-winning investigation of pedophilia, corruption and complicity within the Catholic Church is dense, and in the best way. McCarthy and co-writer Josh Singer's screenplay packs a lot of content into a swift, focused procedural. It requires attention, and rewards attention.

Granted, talking heads aren't always easy to make jump off the screen, but the cast is greater than the sum of their considerable parts. This is marvelous group acting, with each performer carving out distinctive personalities for a roster of characters who could have become homogenized. The SAG Ensemble prize may be sewn up, and if pundits are to be believed, perhaps the Best Picture Oscar?...

I'm not so sure.

Early Oscar Predictions: Original Screenplay

Guess what, guys: It's officially the first day if Spring (though try telling that to the weather), and what better way to kick off the season of new life than by Springing forward into the new Oscar season with some early predictions!

Each Friday until the end of April, I'll be adding new categories to the sidebar with accompanying articles. In the spirit of the filmmaking process, the category order will be based on the order of steps of making a movie. "Loosely" based, at least. There's nothing about these early guesses that isn't completely loosey goosey anyway. But one thing we can assume with some degree of certainty is that most films start with a screenplay, so too will that be our starting point.

First off, even though some pundits have already read many of 2015's buzz-
worthy scripts, landing a nomination depends much more on how well the film is received overall than on the calibre of the writing. It makes spitballing these categories as much of a crapshoot as Best Picture, but there are some distant Best Original Screenplay contenders that certainly look promising enough on paper.

One Category at a Time: Original Screenplay

With the writing on the wall for Birdman as Best Picture and with all four acting races more or less calcified, the screenplay contests are now the biggest question marks of the major categories, and Best Original Screenplay may be the most perplexing of them.

Most years, with prestigious adaptations duking it out in their own ring, this award serves as a nifty consolation prize for a film that stands out for its uniqueness of premise or snazziness of dialogue, but is just slightly too left-of-centre to win in the top category. Even Best Picture winners Million Dollar Baby and The Artist were trumped in this arena by decidedly more imaginative efforts.

WGA Corroborates Pundits' Favs for Writing Oscars

The Writers Guild of America may not be the most reliable Oscar bellwether due to the their annual heap of ineligible screenplays, but when their winners coincide with the perceived frontrunners anyway, it still reassures any doubtful pundits.

This year, my predictions for both writing Oscars were mirrored by the WGA; Graham Moore's script for The Imitations Game in adapted and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel in original (more on that race on Monday).

The documentary field, for a refreshing change of pace, went to something other than CitizenFour, which wasn't nominated. Instead, it went to Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy. I actually caught up with this doc just the other day, and quite liked it. It's often hard to assess how well a non-fiction film is "written", but I tend to think about how well it illuminates or explains its subject matter. That's one arena where Knappenberger's extensive, comprehensive study of free info on the Internet clearly has Laura Poitras' film beat.

BAFTA Clarifies Some Races, Obscures Others

So the EE British Academy of Film and Television Awards just wrapped up not long ago, but you won't get to watch the ceremony until later tonight because for all their fine cinematic tastes, the organization still hasn't evolved past their daft custom of broadcasting the show after all the winners are all public knowledge. Get with the times, BAFTA!

Anyway, I'm not really interested in the program so much as the results. Boyhood shrugged off last night's possibly crippling DGA loss to keep its Oscar hopes afloat. Also winning for the film were Patty Arquette (lock) and director Richard Linklater (not so much a lock).

Other big winners include The Grand Budapest Hotel with five, and The Theory of Everything and Whiplash with three. Oscar frontrunner Birdman took home only a single honour for Emmanuel Lubezki's virtuoso cinematography.

But what I was hoping this last major precursor of the season could really do is help illuminate some of the Academy's more unpredictable races. The British Academy is, after all, similar in membership size to AMPAS, and can therefore offer some clues on what sort of films will appeal to a large group in certain categories.

My Award Nominations: Best Original Screenplay

The Oscars are little more than five weeks away, so it's time to start compiling my own superlatives for the year, starting with Best Original Screenplay. Man, is this category stacked! Any of the five following films would have won in any other year. They're all available for downloading online, and I highly recommend giving them a look. They're all great reads.

You can keep track of my gradually growing list of nominees by clicking the Awards tab in the page header.

Let's dive in, shall we:

WGA Announces Nominees

The final guild of the day is also the most inconsequential, by which I refer to the Writers Guild of America. I say "inconsequential" not as a slight on their organization, but merely as an observation that their finalists for Best Adapted and Original Screenplay have little to no bearing on the Oscar race due to their long list of ineligible titles.

This year, heavyweight writing contenders that were DQed by this guild include Birdman, Selma, Mr. Turner, and The Theory of Everything. So no, don't expect Guardians of the Galaxy to earn a surprise nomination for its script.

Read some additional thoughts on all the nominees below:

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 1: The results

I ended the year with the same numbers I did last year: 19 out of 24 categories correct. That may be just slightly below the average being scored by most pundits this year (who are mostly 20 or higher), but I'm satisfied with it. Let's take a look at just a few of the winners (and losers, but we'll try not to be too mean about it!) after the cut:

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.

WGA winners!

While the Annies drag on, I have more than enough time to mention that the Writers Guild of America have awarded Her, Captain Phillips, and Stories We Tell in their feature film categories. This is an odd scenario in that I can see none of these winners repeating on Oscar night.

My Award nominations: Original Screenplay

The adaptations may have been a bit sparsely populated this year, but the Original Screenplay race was dense with quality. Check out my five finalists after the cut.

Writers Guild nominations

Hot on the heals of yesterday's PGA announcement, the WGA has chimed in with their selections for the year's best screenplays... at least those that were eligible. It rankles every year that a number of the most highly touted films of the year are not qualified for the guild's honour, and this year's list of ineligibilities include likely Oscar nominees 12 Years a Slave and Philomena, among others.

Full list of nominees (and comments) after the cut.

Review - Before Midnight

Love is not perfect for Jesse and Celine. It lacks the romance that first sparked it when the pair met in 1995's Before Sunrise, and it lacks the instinct that reignited it during their not-so-random reunion in 2004's Before Sunset. And in Before Midnight, the third of Richard Linklater's exquisite trilogy, they're forced to question whether or not it can survive the erosive power of time. No, love is not perfect for Jesse and Celine. But it is real. And as in the two films that preceded it, that realism is what makes Before Midnight such an insightful and compelling drama.

For newcomers to this infrequently updated series, viewing the first two movies isn't necessarily required to appreciate the authentic conversation and naturalistic performance which the trilogy has built as its defining characteristic, but it does provide important context. The lovebirds first spent a romantic night in Vienna after a chance encounter on a train in 1994, but then fell out touch. They rendezvoused nine years later in Paris, where Jesse gladly let a plane ticket back to America burn a hole in his pocket, ultimately leaving behind an unhappy marriage but beloved son so he could stay with his “soul mate”.