OVP: Best Adapted Screenplay (2021)
The Nominees Were...
Sian Heder, CODA
Ryusuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, Drive My Car
Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, & Eric Roth, Dune
Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter
Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog
My Thoughts: Similar to the Original Screenplay race (links to all past contests are at the bottom of this page), Best Adapted Screenplay had four Best Picture nominees and one additional citation, in this case a film nominated for two acting trophies. As a result, this isn't the most creative bunch of contenders, with Oscar thinking outside of the box. It is, however, a pretty good list of options. 2021 was a solid year for movies in terms of quality even if it was clearly a growing pains year in terms of box office, with the streaming vs. box office debate raging (for no good reason...streaming was always a dead end for the movie industry).
We're going to start with CODA, which is bizarre because this is easily the longest we've gone without discussing a Best Picture winner in the my ballots. Nominated for only three categories (and winning them all), I was one of the rare people to see CODA in a regular, first-run theater (not in a festival or on AppleTV)...in fact I saw all of the Best Picture nominees of 2021 in theaters. I'm also one of the people (on Film Twitter, at least) to genuinely like it. This film is not breaking any new ground, and winning Best Picture was too much prestige/pressure to put on it, but this is a solidly-structured film & heartwarming. That feels like more of a credit to its acting ensemble than its writing, but this is a script filled with humor & strong touches (Kotsur & Matlin's horny, endearing relationship...Daniel Durant's excessive hotness played for maximum effect), so it's very hard to be mad that it did so well.
That said, Jane Campion's work on The Power of the Dog, which missed as a result of CODA's victory, is playing in a different league. A three-act play that unfolds like that's both necessary AND not too overly-plotted, the movie positions its characters like chess pieces, but ones whose abilities you don't understand until the very end. Cumberbatch's great soliloquies throughout are credited (appropriately) to the actor's strange dialect and unnerving demeanor, but they're also a credit to Campion, knowing the right way to have him speak the truth (about Bronco Henry) while also terrifying any man who dares to challenge him.
The Lost Daughter, like CODA, is also getting its first mention here, and is penned by the rare person to be nominated for both acting & writing, Maggie Gyllenhaal. The movie is very good at wringing the unusual tension of everyday life and escalating it to the point where you feel like you're in a horror movie...there's something bizarre in how it treats white lies & unusual social situations in such a fashion that you are gripping your chair. But the flashback scenes are underwritten, as if we're being left out of things on purpose to make the present more ambiguous. I feel like this takes you out of the film more than it does keeps you on edge.
Drive My Car is in a similar boat. The way the movie is structured and how it uses key aspects of the plot to drive additional emotions (here, instead of tension, it becomes grief), is brilliant, and I think the script needs some credit for sticking to that framing device, particularly the ingenious use of the credits a third of the way through the film. But the movie, if we're being picky (and this is for an Oscar, we have to be), doesn't flesh out side characters enough (the theater owners, for example, are poorly inserted), and I don't know that all of the Uncle Vanya motif works.
The final nominee is Dune, which is partially an unusual nomination given that SciFi rarely shows up here. But as someone who tried to get through Frank Herbert's slog of a book (I had a boyfriend who said it was his favorite book so I was reading it because I am that guy who genuinely reads your recommendations if he likes you, but the second we broke up it went back on my bookshelf to collect dust as it was SO needlessly dense), I was impressed at how well the film adapts. It has a difficult task of both not making the film feel like Star Wars (George Lucas heavily borrowed from Herbert's novel), but also trying to engage in fleshing out a relatively thinly-plotted story. It does that with both, giving us clear stakes, and enigma without it feeling annoying that we won't resolve until the second film.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes combine their writing categories so there is no adapted or original distinction, and in this case most of the nominees were originals, so we just had one (losing) nominee in The Power of the Dog. WGA splits the categories, so we had CODA as the winner against Dune, Nightmare Alley, Tick Tick Boom, and West Side Story (WGA has weird eligibility rules, so I would assume that's why we aren't seeing The Power of the Dog), while BAFTA also went with CODA (I had no memory of that), against the exact Oscar lineup. In terms of sixth place, it was West Side Story. At the time I was over-confident of it (proof that you can't always trust Oscar narratives retroactively), but apparently it being a musical was too big of an obstacle even with a Best Picture nomination & Tony Kushner writing it.
Films I Would Have Nominated: As I said above, there's no bad nominee here-all of these are good movies and thumbs up screenplays. But that's not to say that there's not room for improvement. West Side Story, for example, modernizes the script without making it feel inauthentic or "catered" to a modern audience, which is hard to do for a film whose racially-insensitive initial casting felt like something for which the filmmakers wanted to overtly compensate.
Oscar's Choice: If they'd liked Power of the Dog better, it'd be easy to see Jane Campion getting multiple Oscars. But given she already had a Best Director statue hand-wrapped for her, CODA prevailed in a big way.
My Choice: The Power of the Dog, and it ain't close. Dune is my second, and it's a good script (it'll medal from me), but come on now-Campion's script is so much better her loss will confound future Oscar historians. Behind these two I'll do Drive My Car, CODA, and The Lost Daughter, in that order.
Those are my thoughts-what about you? Do you want to go with Oscar's feel-good CODA or you more inclined to the escalating stakes of The Power of the Dog? For those who have read Frank Herbert's book, are you as impressed as I am by how well they brought it to the screen? And do you think Oscar's aversion to musicals in this category is fair? Share your thoughts below!
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