If you were disappointed by this year’s Oscars nominations, allow me to invite you to a magical land called the Screenplay Awards. Greta Gerwig is here! So is her boyfriend, Noah Baumbach. (Both were left out of the Best Director category.) Gerwig isn’t even the only woman: there’s also Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the Glaswegian screenwriter who co-wrote “1917,” with the director Sam Mendes. True, we don’t have J. Lo., but we do have the sole nomination for “Knives Out,” Rian Johnson’s delectable murder mystery, in which a Latina nurse gets a leg up on a clan of privileged nincompoops. Nor do we have Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) or Pedro Almodóvar (“Pain and Glory”), who spun intimate tales out of autobiography. But here, at least, there’s no choosing between “Parasite” and “Little Women.” They can both win.
Hollywood is notorious for its disregard of the art of screenwriting, so it’s some consolation, perhaps, that writing gets twice as many Oscars categories as directing does, one for an original story and one for an adaptation. (The fact that eight of this year’s nominated screenwriters also directed their films—and one, Taika Waititi, acted in his, as Adolf Hitler—is another matter.) “Original” is a relative term, of course. Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” isn’t directly based on anything, but it’s so riddled with references to late-sixties kitsch that it’s practically a collage. And the script for “Joker,” while adapted from decades-old comic-book characters, owes even more to the work of Martin Scorsese, whose film “The Irishman” is its competitor in several categories, including Best Adapted Screenplay. As for Louisa May Alcott, who’s going to tell her that she’s up against a psychopathic clown?
Below is a rundown of both writing categories.
Best Adapted Screenplay
“The Irishman”
Steven Zaillian won this award back in 1994, for “Schindler’s List.” This time, he adapted “I Heard You Paint Houses,” by the former investigator Charles Brandt, which contained the confessions of one Frank Sheeran, played in “The Irishman” by Robert De Niro. Those confessions—most shockingly, to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa—have come under question recently. Every Oscars year seems to include some truthiness controversy; last year, it was over the supposed cross-racial friendship at the heart of “Green Book,” which went on to win a slew of awards anyway, including for its screenplay. If “The Irishman” has an advantage, it’s sheer size: that screenplay is long. Yet it’s hardly verbose. Witness Anna Paquin’s character, Sheeran’s daughter Peggy, whose seven-word allotment has drawn scrutiny. Does her silence indicate a lack of interest in women’s perspectives, or does it make her accusatory stares at her father all the more powerful? Screenplays are about subtext, after all, and a true actor loves nothing more than the chance to communicate without words.
“Jojo Rabbit”
There are roughly a million ways this script could have gone wrong, and, by some accounts, it did. But “Jojo Rabbit” was always going to be a high-wire act: it’s a pitch-black satire of life under Fascism, told through the eyes of a Nazi moppet whose imaginary friend is der Führer. Taika Waititi based his screenplay on the novel “Caging Skies,” by the New Zealand-based writer Christine Leunens, but it reminded me of the absurdist plays of Christopher Durang—especially the scenes set in the Hitler Youth camp. You watch “Jojo Rabbit” wondering how each scene can possibly make it to the next without the whole cheeky enterprise collapsing in on itself. And, yet, miraculously, it arrives intact at its (bizarrely sweet) finish, in which two youngsters share a little dance as Germany crumbles. For brazenness, this one can’t be beat.
“Joker”
This screenplay, by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver, won’t win the award for subtlety. It’s a bloody parable of alienation, set in a Gotham City that harks back to dirty old nineteen-eighties New York. Its protagonist, Arthur Fleck, isn’t just a poor sap dealing with mental illness and parental neglect but a cackling loony whose lineage may just reveal shocking truths about a certain caped crusader. For my money, the screenplay is too heavy on self-importance and worn narrative tricks (especially when it dips into Arthur’s delusions) and too light on coherence (why can’t anyone in law enforcement manage to catch a serial killer in clown makeup?). Based on characters created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson, this is a blunt instrument of a movie, full of blunt words. (“Everybody is awful these days,” Arthur snarls. “It’s enough to make anyone crazy.”) But we’re living in blunt times.
“Little Women”
Back at the sixth Academy Awards, the husband-and-wife team Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason won the Adapted Screenplay award, for the 1933 version of “Little Women.” Two other major film adaptations of the novel have come in the intervening decades. But none tackled Alcott’s novel with the inventiveness shown by Greta Gerwig, who reshuffled the story into something associative and self-referential. Gerwig’s screenplay, ultimately, is about authorship itself and the ways that women have had to shoehorn their stories into acceptable forms across centuries. It interrogates Alcott and holds her close, all in an effort to set her (or at least her alter ego, Jo March) free. And it handles the big, sweeping moments—such as Laurie’s proposal to Jo—with full-bodied eloquence. Gerwig’s absence from the Best Director list is a bummer. But her presence here is apt: like Alcott, she’s a writer who demands to be heard.
“The Two Popes”
Late in Anthony McCarten’s script, Jorge Bergoglio says to Pope Benedict XVI, after a long colloquy, “Speaking English is exhausting.” “Terrible language,” Benedict replies. “So many exceptions to so many rules.” That exchange speaks volumes about Benedict—the rule-bound traditionalist to Bergoglio’s charismatic reformist—and about the cleverness of McCarten’s screenplay, which has scenes in English, Spanish, Italian, and, Lord help us, Latin. The script, based on McCarten’s play “The Pope,” leans on long tête-à-têtes, but it also stretches in unexpected (and undeniably cinematic) directions, including a long flashback sequence that shows how Bergoglio’s actions under a military junta shaped his own crisis of faith. And the script bursts with humor, as when Bergoglio, as Pope Francis, orders pizza from the Vatican.
Bottom line: If the Academy chooses to honor Gerwig with what might be perceived as a consolation prize, it would be richly deserved. Of all the nominees, her adaptation is the most concerned with adaptation itself. But an all-around surge for “Joker” or “The Irishman” may put one of them over the edge. And, to Academy voters (and anyone else) who may have avoided “The Two Popes” because it sounds dull, do yourselves a favor and kick back with los dos Papas!
Best Original Screenplay
“1917”
Sam Mendes’s First World War drama has jumped to the upper tier of the Best Picture race, but its selling point is production value: those dreamlike vistas, the feat of making it all seem like one continuous shot. The screenplay, written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is a laconic delivery system for the film’s technical marvels, and, although it gets the job done, it doesn’t stray far from war-movie tropes. There’s a search for a valuable soldier, as in “Saving Private Ryan” (1998), and there is war-is-Hell imagery that dates back to “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930). What you remember of “1917” isn’t a single uttered line—it’s the feeling of plummeting into a waterfall or sprinting through a burning village by night. A win in the screenplay category would be an early sign of a “1917” victory parade to come.
