Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 2016

The Contenders:

Arrival
Fences
Hidden Figures
Lion
Moonlight (winner)

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 2016

The Contenders:

Denis Villeneuve: Arrival
Mel Gibson: Hacksaw Ridge
Damien Chazelle: La La Land (winner)
Kenneth Lonergan: Manchester by the Sea
Barry Jenkins: Moonlight

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2016

The Contenders:

Arrival
Fences
Hacksaw Ridge
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight (winner)

Sapir-Whorf

Film: Arrival
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Since one of my degrees is in linguistics, I’ve been asked about Arrival pretty much since it came out. In fact, one of my professors was interviewed about just how closely the film would track attempting to learn an entirely alien language. It’s worth reading that interview, partly because it offers clearer insight on the science than I could offer and because Dr. Birner is awesome. Either go check it out now and come back, or go there as soon as you’re done here. Really.

Anyway, linguistics is front and center in Arrival. More specifically, as you’ve read or will read, Arrival is a big fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, specifically the idea of linguistic determinism. Allow me to get mildly professorial here for just a moment. The lighter, more acceptable (and much more potentially provable) version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the language that we speak affect the way that we communicate—that how we communicate with others is relative to the language that we speak. It makes a certain sense; it’s a hypothesis (linguistic relativity) that I think is at least partially true. The stronger version, and one that Arrival very much wants to put forth, is that our language determines how we see the world, which goes too far for what Sapir-Whorf can support.