Great writing rises to the top
Diverse group of movies beats out presumed sure bets for Oscar screenwriting nods
This year’s original and adapted screenplay Oscar nominees could be seen as an alternate mirror of the best picture race.
Six of the 10 films in the two categories are in fact best picture nominees, featuring a mix of mainstream, commercial hits rubbing against more refined art-house delicacies, plus a number of films that walk the boundary between the two.
Presumed sure things (and past winners) such as Aaron Sorkin for Steve Jobs and Quentin Tarantino for The Hateful Eight were passed over for an eclectic group of nominees. Fifteen writers received their first nomination in the category, including four women.
Nominated for adapted screenplay are Nick Hornby for Brooklyn, Charles Randolph and Adam McKay for The Big Short, Drew Goddard for The Martian, Emma Donoghue for Room and Phyllis Nagy for Carol, the only film in the group not up for best picture.
In the original screenplay category are writers for two best picture nominees: Matt Charman, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen for Bridge of Spies, plus Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy for Spotlight. Also nominated are Alex Garland for Ex Machina, Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff for Straight Outta Compton (story by S. Leigh Savidge, Alan Wenkus and Berloff ) and Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve and Josh Cooley for Inside Out (original story by Docter and Ronnie del Carmen).
Inside Out, while not up for best picture, was nominated in the animated film category, so co-screenwriter and director Docter now has eight Academy Award nominations, including one win. Inside Out imagines the emotional world inside the head of an 11-year-old girl.
Docter said the screenplay nomination is “very meaningful” for the way it breaks the film out for broader consideration.
“People have generally an asterisk next to animated films in their heads,” he said from his home in the San Francisco area. “For so many years, they’ve really been geared toward families and kids, but we really think of them as just films. We’re trying to make movies that we as adults would want to see.
“I’ll be honest, we made it for us,” Docter added. “But, of course, you know that kids will see it too. So you want to be sure that there’s plenty there for everybody.”
Another box-office hit to land a nomination for screenwriting was The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. In adapting Andy Weir’s novel, about an astronaut struggling to survive when he is accidentally stranded on Mars, writer Goddard came to a startling realization.
“The Martian wasn’t about loneliness,” Goddard recently wrote for the L.A. Times’ the Envelope. “Or, at least, it wasn’t concerned with the standard depiction of loneliness. There was an optimism in the face of despair that felt unique. In some ways, it felt like a religious story: A man is trapped by himself in the wilderness and has to rely on his faith to save him. But in this case, the religion in question was science.”
Adifferent sort of survival story was Randolph and McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’s non-fiction book The Big Short, which examined the financial crisis of the late 2000s and a small group of financial-sector outliers who not only saw it coming but managed to turn a profit from it. The cast includes Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale.
As directed by McKay, best known for broad comedies, the film — which grapples with complex financial ideas while making them understandable to the audiences — is at once explanatory and entertaining.
“Doing those simultaneously was always the challenge,” Randolph said in a phone call from Los Angeles. “And not just entertaining but comedic in a certain way, to find the absurdities, to find those sorts of moments. It was a huge challenge.”
The road to bringing Carol to the screen has been a long one, with screenwriter Nagy first becoming involved with the project sometime in late 1990s. The film is adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, best known for thrillers such as Strangers on a Train and with whom Nagy had a friendship in the last years of the author’s life. (Highsmith died in 1995.)
The film, which may not be up for best picture but has six nominations, is both a swept-away romance, an enigmatically unfixed psychological study and an examination of dynamic shifts in power and perspective.
“There’s a certain level of category it defies,” Nagy said. “I think that’s good. That means we all made the movie we set out to make, which you can’t easily define. It’s like quicksilver; the minute you call it a lesbian film, you have to rethink that a bit.
“Not to diminish it. It’s important that it is that and that is there, but it’s more than that,” Nagy said. “And I think that’s where people might sometimes struggle for words to properly describe it. And perhaps one day we won’t have to have that conversation.” Among the most talked-about nominations this year was the screenplay nomination for Straight Outta Compton. It was the only Oscar nomination for the film, which had been a box-office and critical hit and had scored nominations from groups such as the Producers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild.
The film, directed by F. Gary Gray, tells the story of the influential rap group N.W.A., which arose from the city of Compton to worldwide recognition. Recently for the Times’ the Envelope, screenwriters Herman and Berloff chronicled their experiences in bringing the story to life. The writers spent months interviewing the surviving members of the group and others who lived out the story.
“We knew that Straight Outta Compton could be more than a musical biopic for a specialized audience,” they wrote. “We intended to use the story of N.W.A. to create an event movie about America, a movie that explored the themes of freedom of speech, of race, of police abuse and more.
“Wrapped up in all of those big ideas, there would be a story about intense friendship between young African American men, a group that doesn’t often get their turn in the spotlight,” they said. “And we hoped that these men and their journey would resonate with anyone who has ever been young, ambitious and passionate.”