In less than a month we will be sitting in front of our televisions watching the Academy Awards. Some of us will be running straight to our laptops to type away in an angry fervor as to why the geek favorite didn’t win all 20 awards. However, now is not the time for this. With time still on our side, let’s have an open and honest discussion.
Before we even talk about the nominees this year it’s best to talk about the category itself. What qualifies as a great screenplay? And what are the factors that you look for in this determination? There are so many things that go into a screenplay that are worth looking at. It’s not just the plot and the dialogue but also the characters fleshed out page to page. It’s one thing to impress with quotable lines, but when you can create characters that stick with me and I invest in throughout, you know you’ve written a great screenplay. This element is what I tend to weigh the most heavily as to who should win this award.
Recall, the nominees are: The Hurt Locker (written by: Mark Boal), Inglorious Basterds (written by: Quentin Tarantino), The Messenger (written by: Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman), A Serious Man (written by: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) and Up (written by: Bob Peterson & Pete Docter).
Who should win the award and why? I would like to go back to my stipulation above as to what I look for in a marvelous screenplay. It’s not just fun, witty dialogue (I love you QT) but rather completely fleshed out characters that exist in the world that is presented to us. Let us first discuss which films don’t deserve the award.
Why doesn’t A Serious Man deserve the win? Because it’s the Coen’s indulging in their own crazy fantasies again. They did it with Burn After Reading and it didn’t work for me then. The characters are definitely there but in a world that is too ridiculous for the Academy. It makes for one confusing and messy watch.
Why doesn’t Up deserve the win? Because as great as Pixar is at offering beautiful adventures on screen, I can’t help but feel like the characters and plot were brushed over for the sake of the adventure this time around. Instead of sticking with its characters, it decides to run off and just have set-piece after set-piece in the second half of the film.
Why doesn’t Inglorious Basterds deserve the win? This movie is everything I’d hoped it would be. It has everything that a Quentin Tarantino screenplay is known for, but in the end it’s not enough. It has all the fun characters that exist in QT’s world and are fun to hang out with, but at times it felt like my enjoyment of these characters relied too heavily on quotable lines as opposed to the true-to-self nature that bring characters to life.
What do I think should win? This leaves us with The Hurt Locker and The Messenger, which to be honest is a toss-up as to which I prefer. Both offer some real-to-life characters that are true to themselves. After the credits started to roll I wanted to spend even more time with them. However, in the end I have to go with The Messenger to take the award for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards this year. What The Messenger offered me that The Hurt Locker didn’t was a set of characters that I can root for. It’s all interesting to watch the team in The Hurt Locker deal with their final days in Iraq, but even better was watching Capt. Tony Stone and Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery go door to door and hand out bad news to everyday people, while seeing the effect it has on them. The story was better laid out for the viewer to enjoy than Mark Boal’s very constrained tale.
Now, more importantly, what will the Academy do? The Academy is very used to picking the safe film in this category, something critics love and the general populace probably hasn’t seen. In 2008, Milk beat In Bruges and WALL E; in 2003 Lost in Translation beat Finding Nemo and in 2000 Almost Famous beat Gladiator and Erin Brockovich. This shows that the Academy has a tendency to snub the obviously popular choice and at the same time go for the critically-acclaimed film. What has been getting all the critical buzz leading up to the Oscars? The Hurt Locker. After Kathryn Bigelow won the DGA for The Hurt Locker, followed by the film taking top prizes at the Art Directors Guild Awards and the Editors Guild Awards, it’s easy to see that this is the critically-hailed-type film that will be championed by the Academy.
Everyone is predicting that Inglorious Basterds will win the award and even though Pulp Fiction won it in 1994 I just can’t see the Academy handing it to Quentin Tarantino for a film that really has only one stand-out character (Hans Landa) and the rest pretty much brushed over.
The few cases in the last couple years where the Academy has gone with the popular film include 2007, when Juno beat Michael Clayton and The Savages, and 2006, when Little Miss Sunshine beat The Queen and Babel. However, when you look at those films you can see that both employ the fun-hipster-child learning about life mantra which tends to run true through in the film, and that theme is not in any of the nominees for 2009. Hence why I believe that the Academy will award The Hurt Locker.
Who should win? The Messenger (by. Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman)
Who will win? The Hurt Locker (by. Mark Boal)
What do you want to see win? what should?