Anatomy of a Fall (winner)
The Holdovers
Maestro
May December
Past Lives
What’s Missing
It’s not always easy to tell what belongs in Original Screenplay and what belongs in Adapted Screenplay. I do my best with these but may well have made a mistake or two. As tends to be the case, I think our list of nominations could use some differences from what we got. Wes Anderson tends to be a perennial contender in this category, but I don’t know that I would nominate Asteroid City, which feels like a drop off for him. The Iron Claw felt like too much of a deviation from reality, at least for me, and while a lot of people loved The Boy and the Heron, I felt like it was all over the place. Knock at the Cabin was better than I expected, but probably still not something I would nominate, and while I liked Infinity Pool, it seems like a stretch. Horror and science fiction are not Oscar darlings, but I would think about at least considering both They Cloned Tyrone and Late Night with the Devil. Polite Society deserved a lot more acclaim and attention than it got. For me, though, the big miss was You Hurt My Feelings.
Weeding through the Nominees
5. Maestro feels like one of those films that people are supposed to like, but that could never live up to its hype. I suppose the screenplay is fine, but I don’t really see it as that exceptional. It’s a biopic, and not a specifically interesting one. When you have a genuinely interesting comedy like You Hurt My Feelings and a genre mashup like Polite Society ignored, there’s no reason for this to be in the running. I didn’t hate the movie, but I also can’t really think of a reason to watch it a second time. Of all of these nominations, this is the one that most clearly doesn’t belong.
4. The screenplay for May December is a good one, and there might be a little guilt putting it in fourth, but I like the other three screenplays better than this one. The story is one that is surprisingly difficult once you realize what is actually happening, and the screenplay handles it really well. Given a completely open field, I don’t think it would get a nomination from me, but it would be very close, and probably my first runner-up for nominations. Part of it might be that I find it difficult to separate the screenplay from the topic of the screenplay in this case, because it’s a lot more upsetting for someone in my profession.
3. I really don't like the fact that I’m putting The Holdovers in third because in a different year, this is a film that I could easily see winning. The one thing that keeps me from moving it up higher is that there are parts of this that feel like I’ve seen it before. A great deal of The Holdovers feels like Profumo di Donna/Scent of a Woman, although I think this is a vastly superior film to both of those. It’s also a film that really requires the performances be on point, and they are, but this makes the screenplay difficult to separate from what is on the screen. Regardless, this is a nomination I fully endorse.
My Choices
2. When I wrote down my notes for this post, I originally had actual winner Anatomy of a Fall as my winner but ultimately decided to place it in second. I don’t hate that it won; it’s a very good screenplay and one that is very unclear on how it is going to end up until the last few scenes. It may be a film that comes across as too clinical for a lot of people, and it does feel unemotional in places for a story that clearly has a great deal of emotional content. I love the way this story is told though, and much of that comes through the way the screenplay presents it. I’m fine with this win, even if my choice goes elsewhere.
1. Ultimately, though, I’ve decided that if I had to vote, I would have gone with Past Lives. This is a small story, and a tender one, but it strikes deeply at the heart of the human condition. How would our lives be different if a single choice had gone a different way? How would our lives be different if someone else had made a different choice? Change a single one of hundreds of decisions in my life, and I never meet my wife and my kids don’t exist. Would that other life be better? Worse? That’s the heart of Past Live, and it presents this idea beautifully and with poignant and heartfelt simplicity.
Final Analysis
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