2016 Oscar Preview: Best Adapted Screenplay

THE NOMINEES:

- The Big Short (Adam McKay & Charles Randolph)
- Brooklyn (Nick Hornby)
- Carol (Phyllis Nagy)
- The Martian (Drew Goddard)
- Room (Emma Donoghue)

SHOULD BE HERE: Steve Job (Aaron Sorkin)

I completely understand why Steve Jobs received a "meh" response from America. It was the third movie released about Apple's co-founder since 2011 and the overt three-act, playwright, Sorkin-esque style of the film is initially jarring. But I found the style fascinating and bold in all the right ways.

Steve Jobs is a non-traditional biopic that explores Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) relationship with the most important people in his life throughout three separate product launches in his career. Each product launch (Macintosh in 1984, NeXT's "Cube" in 1988, and the iMac in 1998) not only explores Jobs' vision of technology, but the culmination of his life and the people in it. Of course Steve Jobs never had multiple heart-to-heart's and arguments with all of these people at the separate product launches, but it was a clever and interesting device in order to tell the life story of Steve Jobs. Certainly knowing the structure of film going into it helped me like the structure (and the film as a whole) more, but I thought Sorkin (and his dialogue) created an excellent script.

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS ON THE NOMINATIONS:

2015 Oscar Preview: Best Screenplay

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

THE NOMINEES:

- Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, et al.)

- Boyhood (Richard Linklater)

- Foxcatcher (E. Max Frye & Dan Futterman)

- Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)

- The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

WHAT SHOULD BE HERE: Selma (Paul Webb)

Paul Webb first deserves all the credit in the world for calling his script Selma as opposed to obvious "King", or really anything involving Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's name. The film is not a true biopic of Dr King's life, but rather it just focuses on a certain time in his life protesting in Selma, Alabama. The title tells us this right off of the bat. One of the many problems with Lincoln was that the title lead us to believe we were getting an Abraham Lincoln biopic, when in fact we were just getting a perspective of Lincoln's life trying to get the 13th Amendment passed. There are a lot of similarities between Lincoln and Selma, but like most things, Selma stands head and shoulders above Lincoln. Further, Webb does a fantastic job of telling the audience the certain grunt work it takes to start a revolution, and by doing so, he not only created an entertaining film, but he managed to do so while only focusing on one major character. It's really hard to create a good film while writing so many two-dimensional characters as Selma had.

Lastly, I have no idea why Selma would have been considered an original script. I understand that Paul Webb didn't work off of a particular book, movie, or newspaper article, but he also didn't write this entire script from the top of his head either. Webb almost certainly looked through historical documents in order to tell even a half-accurate story. Movies like Nightcrawler and The Grand Budapest Hotel are works that are solely the product of a writer sitting down in a room and using their creativity to craft stories and characters. Webb had to do a touch more work than that.

Click here to read my full review of Selma

2014 Oscar Preview: Best Screenplay

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

NOMINEES:

- Before Midnight (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Richard Linklater)

- Captain Phillips (Billy Ray)

- Philomena (Steve Coogan, Jeff Pope)

- 12 Years A Slave (John Ridley)

- The Wolf of Wall Street (Terrence Winter)

SHOULD BE HERE: The Place Beyond The Pines (Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder)

The main reason The Place Beyond The Pines is such an excellent film was because of the script. The style used throughout in combination with the unconventional story telling makes this script easily one of the best of the year. I could go into all sorts of detail about how great the script is, but then I'd ruin the movie for you. Just go rent it now.

2013 Oscar Preview: Best Adapted Screenplay

Click here for my introduction

NOMINEES

• Argo (Chris Terrio)
• Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin & Lucy Alibar)
• Life of Pi (David Magee)
• Lincoln (Tony Kushner)
• Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell)

MY THOUGHTS