Oscars 2023: The Screenplay Also Rises

The Screenplay awards at the Oscars very rarely have to do with the writing itself. Most of the time now, maybe always, it was a secondary prize to Best Picture. Even when a film only wins Screenplay, like Belfast or Get Out, it’s almost always because people loved the movie and want to give it a major prize.

That was often true in the era when there were only five Best Picture nominees, but it is especially true now, in the era of the expanded ballot. It seems fitting as we pass through a moment of history where collectivism is valued over individualism that Best Picture would almost seem like an afterthought. There are no sweeps anymore. No film can dominate with so many other fine films in competition.

Last year’s winner, CODA was proof enough of just how dramatically things have changed. It wasn’t just that it was a film on a streaming platform, Apple-TV, it was that it came into the race with just three Oscar nominations. Even though it won all three, it is still a shocking change from how things used to be, say, back when Gladiator won Best Picture, and Traffic won for Screenplay and Director. (Recall Steven Soderbergh had helmed two Oscar favorites that year — Traffic and Erin Brockovich — so his ballot clout was cumulative.) CODA won Screenplay because its director wasn’t even nominated.

What happened last year was that Goldilocks couldn’t find the right temperature for the porridge. She went looking from room to room but nothing scratched the itch. She knew what she didn’t want (Power of the Dog, Belfast), but she didn’t know what she wanted until she saw CODA. That scratched the itch of the collective sense of purpose that some voters seem to need now in the post-2020 industry.

In general, in recent years, a film wins either Best Director or Screenplay. It’s easier to win adjacent Oscars if the writer and director are two different people, as with Argo, The Hurt Locker and The King’s Speech — films that won all three top prizes. Birdman and Parasite also won all three, but Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won were co-writers, so the honor was shared.

Original Screenplay is packed this year. Adapted Screenplay, not so much. Hollywood and the Oscars are shrinking in significance in the minds of the public overall. When you get down to it, I think, it’s all about the writing. Much of Hollywood has become so disconnected from the struggles of daily life they can no longer present stories that resonate more broadly or universally. They write for one small group – Oscar voters, Twitter. But that isn’t expansive and it isn’t memorable.

I suspect that there are unknown good scripts that will never get made — either because the writer is a white male, or the subject is not activist enough, or doesn’t move the needle enough, or may be deemed offensive to this or that group. Hollywood has been crushed under the weight of good intentions. That, combined with crippling fear has led to a frigid, almost unwatchable movie landscape.

The only safe targets seem to be rich white people or just white people. We’re seeing a lot of these movies this year. It’s a mirror reflection of the reversed hierarchy we’ve seen evolve online as “social justice warriors” once written off as angry tweens on Tumblr now dominate the work force and are out with their clipboards checking off the thought-crimes one by one, ensuring adherence to the strict new code of conduct.

It isn’t entirely their fault. Much of it can be laid at the feet of terrified executives who need to protect themselves by making sure they have the right representation to keep the activists off their back. Some call it “woke capitalism” — meaning, if you virtue signal loud enough you can keep your place in the food chain and no one will complain about anything else you do.

Courageous people are few and far between. One of the bravest and best writers around is Mike White whose second season of The White Lotus has become such a cultural phenom it proves just how hungry the public has become for truth in storytelling — authentic characters, authentic stories not bending toward social justice. He doesn’t tell you how to think or what to think. He tells you stories that are exciting and involving.

Mike White’s writing is so good, The White Lotus, season 2 has overtaken TikTok. The internet made memes of a key moment, sent the whole thing viral, and dissected every inch of the story and the characters. It has the same kind of public interest as the Johnny Depp trial because it feels real. It isn’t real, of course, but it’s authentic because it digs at human truths. Even the conservatives have been touched by it. It was mentioned on the All In Podcast. No movie playing in theaters has reached people in the same way. Why, because it’s good storytelling that isn’t buried under a blanket of frigid virtue.

From the Federalist:

HBO’s “White Lotus” is the sharpest commentary on western decay in popular culture, a subtle and subversive invasion of America’s favorite medium. As the second season proved again on Sunday, Mike White challenges limp modern assumptions about sex, honoring the real “feminine mystique” as exactly that—an eternal mystery capable of bringing powerful men to their knees.

There’s an irony in this visual feast, constructed to the tune of some $3 million a episode, training its arrow straight at the heart of American decadence. But writer and creator White deploys his ample resources for good, using all that sweet, sweet Warner Bros. cash to do something very simple: tell a great story that honors beauty and nature.

The series has captivated audiences the way movies used to do and still can, provided there is some connection to the real world in them. Mike White is someone who stands outside of the bubble and looks a the whole picture, which is why he’s able to write honestly. No one is spared.

Many screenplays cover much of the same territory of “western decay in modern culture.” But they almost always position the storyteller as being on the “good” side. The audience is expected to either sit in judgment of the “bad” people, or squirm in their seats with guilt. Ask yourselves why you would pay to see that. Watching The White Lotus season 2, it’s easy to see why it stands out in a sea of endless content: because he gets to human truths.

Universal stories connect us in a way nothing else can. That is what movies have traditionally been about. But Hollywood is going through a phase where either they no longer understand their audiences or actively loathe broad swaths of them. And unfortunately, it’s becoming a problem at the box office. It isn’t just a matter of competition on streaming. It’s a matter of courage to find writing so good that people have to see it. That is what The White Lotus season 2 offers.

To that point, there are just a handful of screenplays in the mix this year that I think rise above the current crippled nature of typical storytelling. In general, in my opinion, if they don’t gild the lily they have succeeded. If they don’t foist an imposed ideology onto the screenplay, they’ve written something valuable and lasting. Be true to the story and its characters, don’t deviate, and put your own ideology front and center.

That is one of the reasons why Martin McDonagh’s sublime screenplay for The Banshees of Inisherin stands out above the rest in the original screenplay category. Every one of his characters is true to who they are. This isn’t so much a story of redemption or of “seeing the light,” it is a way into humanity’s conundrum: why do we fight? We do we kill each other? Why do we do terrible things to each other? Well, the film doesn’t answer those questions explicitly but it posits a theory: if we’re cut off from love, culture, art, we’re left with nothing but hate, frustration, anger.

The second best original script is by Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans. Obviously, Kushner is one of the best writers in the business. He isn’t going to sell out his characters, and Spielberg is the source material and he won’t sell out those real people either. Much of the screenplay seems to match Spielberg’s own sensibilities, with some awkwardness, obsessiveness, and humor mixed in. We watch Spielberg grow up and we gain better insight into one of the greatest directors of all time.

Both Banshees and The Fabelmans illustrate beautifully how art can rescue us from life’s complications, provided art is set free to tell the truth and not suffocated by dogma. Another original screenplay along these same lines is Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. As the characters wrestle with the painful complications of life, the remedy to soothe their anguish was there all along — the movie theater. That’s where they can disappear for a few hours and be swept away by the dream-makers. But only if they are not caged. Let them free. We need them.

Another one of the frontrunners this year in the category is Everything Everywhere All at Once but here we have a director-led film with a serpentine screenplay that necessarily serves as the intricate framework for their visual experience. The words on the page might be hard to comprehend until they become images on the screen. Yet it might win anyway if the film is popular enough that voters want to see it win a major prize – and if that prize is Best Picture, it may very well win Screenplay along with it, at the very least.

TÁR is another example where the film itself would be the reason the screenplay won. It isn’t so much the writing that stands out as the directing, and Cate Blanchett’s performance. Like Everything Everywhere is about Michelle Yeoh’s performance. TÁR is an interesting analysis of the many sides of “cancel culture,” which makes it a hybrid film that exists with one foot in the old world that is about to collapse, and one foot in the new world which is about to be set free. At some point in the future, we’ll be able to watch a movie like TÁR and name the exact time and place when it happened in our cultural history. Todd Field’s masterpiece is one of the few movies to really tackle this issue from a critical point of view.

Triangle of Sadness seems to be a screenplay many of the Gold Derby pundits have in their top five. It’s one of the many films that depict a dying world of white privilege. The characters represent archetypes that fulfill their role in a dark fable about systemic oppression. Glass Onion does much the same thing, as did Knives Out. It’s not exactly a whodunnit because, in essence, it’s really about the hierarchy. Both films are about the ultra-rich and how they screw over the poor (but with the added layer of race and identity). This will scratch the itch for many people in Hollywood. The reason being, even though they are the very people the movie is harpooning, some may feel that watching it and getting it will offer them hope of redemption.

The Adapted Screenplay category is what many may say is weak. Leading the pack is Sarah Polley’s concise and precise adaption of the novel Women Talking. Though a writer by nature, Polley’s film is less about the writing and more about the acting. Even though it’s an adaptation, Polley’s own voice can be heard loud and clear throughout. This film seems almost more personal than her intimate documentary Stories We Tell. It’s a careful adaptation that makes sure every point of the story is respected. If it does win in this category, it will be a win for Polley herself, for her great leap forward with this film.

Glass Onion fits the description, though it is an adapted screenplay. I would watch out for All Quiet on the Western Front and Top Gun Maverick in this category, just based on how thin the contenders are (many directors like to write their own screenplays now). The Whale is also something to consider, if it hits at all with voters.

Predictions for Original Screenplay
The Banshees of Inisherin
The Fabelmans
Everything Everywhere All At Once
TÁR
Empire of Light

Next Tier
Elvis
Triangle of Sadness
Till

Predictions for Adapted Screenplay
Women Talking
She Said
All Quiet on the Western Front
Glass Onion
Top Gun: Maverick

Next Tier
Living
White Noise
EO