Page through the annals of Oscar, and you’ll notice that the writing awards often celebrate inventiveness and wit, while the more high-profile prizes tilt toward heart. Consider the past decade’s screenplay winners, which include such happy oddities as Spike Jonze’s “Her,” in which a man falls in love with an operating system; Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” a satire-horror film that exposes the racism lurking beneath liberal politesse; and Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit,” a deadpan comedy about an adorable Nazi-in-training. For each film, it was the sole award, as if committing these harebrained ideas to a laptop were achievement enough. Or, look back a few decades earlier, to the ceremony of 1942, when John Ford’s wistful portrait of Welsh village life, “How Green Was My Valley,” won the top prize, while the jaundiced and jigsaw-like “Citizen Kane” managed to win its one and only Oscar for its screenplay.
This year, the tangled story behind that screenplay and its uneasy collaborators, Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, is the subject of “Mank,” itself nominated for ten Oscars, the most of any film this season. Notably, the writing categories are among the few in which this ode to an undersung screenwriter doesn’t appear, despite the fact that it was written by Jack Fincher, who died in 2003, and directed by his son, David, as a kind of filial offering. Oh, well. Not every poignant made-for-awards-season backstory gets results, and the ten movies that are nominated contain plenty of ingenuity. Take the Best Adapted Screenplay contenders, which draw on sources ranging from a French play and a nonfiction study of America’s transient seniors to a preëxisting character who may be Kazakhstan’s most famous son, despite being entirely fictional. Here’s a closer look at both of this year’s writing categories.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”
There are nine—nine!—writers credited for this moviefilm, and none of them is named Rudy Giuliani. Eight wrote the screenplay, and an overlapping group of four has story credit. Instead of a nineteenth-century novel or a Broadway play, the screenplay is based on a character who first appeared on a British sketch show in the nineties and is known for his anti-Semitism and public defecation. Sacha Baron Cohen’s semi-improvised satires belong to a writing category all their own, since they depend on the unwitting contributions of his real-world marks. None of this fazed the Writers Guild, which awarded this gaggle of pranksters its adapted-screenplay prize in March. And why not? It takes a sui-generis sort of mastery to build a series of outrageous provocations into a damning portrait of American ugliness.
“The Father”
The French writer Florian Zeller made his reputation as a literary enfant terrible, publishing his first novel, “Artificial Snow,” when he was twenty-two, but it was his 2012 play, “Le Père,” that brought him international notoriety. Christopher Hampton’s English translation played on London’s West End and on Broadway, where it won a 2016 Tony Award for Frank Langella. I wish I’d seen it then, because the movie version—Zeller’s film-directing début—is so packed with structural surprise that it seems endemic to the screen. The film is a maze that places us inside the disintegrating mind of Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), a belligerent old man with advanced dementia. Countless films about one ailment or another follow a familiar, heart-tugging pattern, and you may have assumed that “The Father” is one of them. But it isn’t. Zeller’s screenplay has the cunning of a sleight-of-hand trick, disorienting us along with its title character—a technique that only deepens the impact of its emotional wallops.
“Nomadland”
Chloé Zhao spun her portrait of a restless soul in the late-capitalist wilderness from Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, subtitled “Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.” The book profiled a range of American seniors who set out, post-recession, to crisscross the country in vans and mobile homes finding seasonal work at Amazon fulfillment centers, raspberry fields, and oil rigs. Some of Bruder’s subjects play themselves in the film, but it centers on a fictional sixty-something, Fern (Frances McDormand), whose town of Empire, Nevada, all but evaporates after the closure of a United States Gypsum plant. Zhao’s screenplay shows how elastic the act of adaptation can be, distilling a panorama of true stories into an invented one that feels just as lived-in and idiosyncratic as the rest.
“One Night in Miami”
Long before the credits rolled on Regina King’s civil-rights drama, I had an inkling that I’d see the words “based on the stage play.” Kemp Powers adapted his own play, which premièred at Los Angeles’s Rogue Machine Theatre, in 2013, and imagines a real night from 1964 that brought together four Black icons: the soul singer Sam Cooke, the activist Malcolm X, the running back Jim Brown, and the boxing champion Cassius Clay, soon to become Muhammad Ali. The script is bursting with timely, dialectical arguments about political engagement and Black identity, but it reminded me of other plays I’ve seen that tease out the meetings of notable minds, often played out as a battle of ideas—a genre that can bend toward talky, self-important, and pat. Powers’s script doesn’t escape these pitfalls (and its treatment of Cooke had drawn scrutiny), though it’s buoyed by crackling performances.
The sole nomination for this funny, haunting, irrepressible film is for the director Ramin Bahrani’s screenplay, based on Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel, which won the Man Booker Prize. You can sense the novel pulsing beneath the action, propelled by the chatty, eager voice of its main character, Balram, a low-born Indian striver who talks his way into a job chauffeuring a rich entrepreneur and reinvents himself as the owner of a taxi service—with a few bloody twists. “The White Tiger” echoes last year’s big Oscar winner, “Parasite,” in its view of the perils and the indignities of the class divide. But, where “Parasite” was steely and stoic, “The White Tiger” zips along like a sugar high, covering a vast narrative ground while still immersing us in the claustrophobia of the caste system.
Bottom line: Although “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” won the W.G.A.’s award, that victory isn’t necessarily predictive. “Nomadland” and “The Father” were ineligible, since they weren’t written under a Writers Guild contract. “Nomadland” is the front-runner for Best Picture and most likely here, too, in part thanks to its unconventional source material. A “Nomadland” loss might signal a dampening of its over-all momentum, or perhaps a desire not to let “The Father” or Baron Cohen (who is nominated for an acting award for “The Trial of the Chicago 7”) go empty-handed. As for “The White Tiger,” let its nomination serve as a reminder to seek it out on Netflix.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
“Judas and the Black Messiah”
On one level, Shaka King’s drama—written by King and Will Berson, with additional story credits for Keith and Kenny Lucas—tells a familiar tale: that of an undercover informant torn between the authorities he serves and the cause he has agreed to betray. The guilt-ridden snitch, here, is William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a real-life petty criminal who evaded felony charges by infiltrating the Black Panthers on behalf of the F.B.I.—and then forged a tortured closeness with the group’s fiery leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). We’ve seen a similar conflict in Mafia movies such as “Donnie Brasco,” and Judases, for good reason, are perennial subjects. But what distinguishes King’s film is its milieu: the revolutionary Black politics of the late sixties, which could hardly be more relevant, and which the writers paint with harrowing detail.
“Minari”
The writer-director Lee Isaac Chung reached into his own childhood to tell this tale of a Korean-American family that moves to Arkansas in 1983 to start a farm. The film has the first-person intimacy of “The Glass Menagerie,” and it thrums with the double vision of what its author could and couldn’t see in childhood about the adults who surrounded him, whether his hardworking parents (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han) chasing an elusive American dream or the prickly grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) who arrives from South Korea like a mysterious gift without an instruction book. Chung’s script was the only nominee here that wasn’t eligible for the W.G.A. awards (the spot went to “Palm Springs”), and it’s a formidable entry—a coming-of-age tale told with clear eyes and unflinching heart. When the family’s aspirations go up in literal smoke, you feel the loss.
“Promising Young Woman”
Before catapulting into the Oscar race with her audacious début feature, Emerald Fennell published children’s fantasy novels, wrote for the spy series “Killing Eve,” and played Camilla Parker Bowles on “The Crown.” It’s not a résumé that prepares you for this candy-striped feminist revenge thriller, but what could? Like “Get Out,” Fennell’s movie draws on a timeworn B-movie genre, in this case the rape-revenge flick, and takes it on a couple of hairpin turns. The Internet has already produced a book’s worth of think pieces dissecting what “Promising Young Woman” is about, what it gets wrong or right about sexual assault and trauma, and what to make of its brutal last act. But the movie itself isn’t an essay. It’s a thorny, stylish, scary mirror of the #MeToo age, and the voice behind it is unmistakable.
“Sound of Metal”
To watch Darius Marder’s film is to be uniquely aware of words. There are the words that its protagonist, Ruben (Riz Ahmed), can no longer hear, after life as a heavy-metal drummer has torn his eardrums to shreds. There are the words he learns in American Sign Language in his new life, in a community for hearing-impaired recovering addicts. And there are the words that appear at the bottom of the screen, not just dialogue but descriptions of blasting music or ambient party chatter—the sounds that Ruben can no longer make out. Marder, who shares story credit with the director Derek Cianfrance (who originated the project and then dropped it) and wrote the screenplay with his brother Abraham Marder, expertly captures the tension between getting plunged into a marginalized subculture and wanting to hold on to the person you were before.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7”
Few writer-directors are more closely identified with their screenwriting style than with their directorial aesthetic, but think “Aaron Sorkin” and you think about dialogue: motor-mouthed, snappy to the point of stagy, and dotted with Gilbert and Sullivan references. Perhaps that’s why Sorkin showed up here and not, surprisingly, in the Best Directing category. Though his writerly tics can grate, particularly in his lesser TV series, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is “good” Sorkin, not too indulgent in his screwball tendencies or in soaring, moralistic speeches (though it has its share of both). In recounting the politicized trial of the activists who were charged with conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, Sorkin uses the courtroom much as he did in “A Few Good Men”: as a stage across which ideas and colorful characters dance.
Bottom line: It’s a crowded five-way race, but “Promising Young Woman” seems to be the front-runner: it’s a screenplay that demands attention, turning cinematic tropes on their head and announcing the arrival of an uncompromising voice. Plus, it’s an underdog for Best Picture, and voters might want to reward it for sheer gumption. “Minari” also has a winning little-movie-that-could quality. But don’t underestimate the pull of Sorkin, who reminds the Academy’s white baby-boomer contingent that they fought the good fight in the sixties (even if they were just partying at Dennis Hopper’s place).
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