OVP: Original Screenplay (1999)

OVP: Best Original Screenplay (1999)

The Nominees Were...

Alan Ball, American Beauty

Charlie Kaufman, Being John Malkovich

Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia

M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense

Mike Leigh, Topsy-Turvy

My Thoughts: All right, we are in the home stretch now as we enter the Big 8, and we generally start this with Original Screenplay.  Part of the reason we do that is, historically, you're more likely to find Best Picture nominees in the Best Adapted Screenplay category (so it feels more like we're climbing the mountain), but we are hardly Best Picture shy here, with two contenders (and the eventual winner) in the quintet.  This is also a category, I'll be honest, I'm not totally sold on whom I'm picking as my winner, so I'm going to kind of decide as I write this whether or not I'll give one of two films my statue.

Let's start with our last nomination for Topsy-Turvy in the discussion.  The film dominated the tech categories, and that was enough to get Mike Leigh another citation to his collection of nominations-without-wins (seriously, give the man an Honorary Oscar).  The script here, unlike the technical aspects, is just okay.  I think that it tells an interesting story, but because it's so linear, we don't get a lot of the fun meandering into the human experience that we receive in the best of Leigh's scripts like Secrets & Lies and Another Year.  I wanted more introspection, and this doesn't quite have that in the same degree as I would've hoped.  Still enjoyable, but not a Mike Leigh masterwork.

Being John Malkovich brought Charlie Kaufman his first of five nominations (to date) from the Academy, and it is an ingenious script.  I like Kaufman's movies better when he's being directed by someone else, and Spike Jonze is there to provide some restraint, which helps this script.  I think that some of my personal problems with the film are around not the script, which is really clever in its look at sexual politics, celebrity, and consumerism, and more around John Cusack being a bad casting choice in the lead.  Really good stuff here, some of Kaufman's best.

Magnolia, on the other hand, is not one of my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson scripts.  This is a controversial take (I know some who set their clock by this movie), but I did not like this film.  That is partially on me, I'll take it-the black-as-coal look at humanity is something that I can sometimes take, and sometimes it feels a bit too Joker-esque.  I'll own that it's been a while since I've seen this, and maybe as an older man I could handle what's happening...but my notes on this eviscerate the movie's meandering plot, one with too many loose ends, and nothing about my memory makes me want to relive this (though Cruise & Moore are excellent).  If you're a huge fan (I've never been so different in my take of a movie compared to my Letterboxd followers, including my brother Luke whom I rarely disagree with by more than a star-and-a-half on a film), let's blame younger John on not liking this one (even though I honestly don't think older John is going to love it either).

And then we get to the two Best Picture nominees.  American Beauty is, in my opinion, a textbook definition of a great film script.  All of the storylines work-there's no point where I'm wanting to go in for another character, wanting to just spend time, with, say Annette Bening over the rest of the cast.  The movie's shrewd look behind-the-curtain of suburbia was so influential that it became the norm in film and television in the following decades.  I love everything about this...except the ending.  I do not think the ending of this film works (it's way too sentimental), and while a movie should be more than one aspect, if we're splitting hairs, that's gotta count for something.

The Sixth Sense, of course, famously aces its ending.  If we're comparing the two, The Sixth Sense's biggest issue would be around some of the dealings with Bruce Willis's character, where the limitations of the twist ending mean that we don't explore some of his more complicated dealings with his wife and his career.  But this film is littered with really great lines ("I see dead people" became a classic for a reason) and those end monologues, particularly between Toni Collette & Haley Joel Osment, are fantastic and human, adding a real sense of feeling to a horror movie (harder to do than you'd think without it coming across as cheesy).

Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes combine adapted and original into one category, and in a rare situation, all five of them would eventually get an Oscar nomination (usually at least one gets skipped by the Academy).  Three are adapted, including the winner American Beauty and Being John Malkovich & The Sixth Sense took nominations.  The BAFTA's have them divvied up like Oscar does, and their adapted field included Being John Malkovich as the winner against All About My Mother, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, and Topsy-Turvy while the WGA went with the same winner and nominees as Oscar, except they dumped Topsy-Turvy in favor of Three Kings.  If we're being real, I don't think any of these were in sixth place.  Pedro would win this category three years later, but Talk to Her was a bigger deal than All About My Mother was at the time, and while Three Kings was a serious film in 1999 (I rewatched it as a catch-up for a reason), it might have been too controversial to get in with Oscar.  I'd theorize that Sweet & Lowdown, with two acting nominations and it being Woody Allen, was probably just out-of-reach in this lineup (I'm just going to mention that The Matrix is not something Oscar was cool enough to nominate for writing in 1999).

Films I Would Have Nominated: I'm going to be totally real here-Original Screenplay is maybe the weakest I've seen it in the years we've profiled for 1999...in the last two weeks of my My Ballot I'm on the hunt specifically for better options here.  But I do think that if they were ever going to nominate the taste-specific films of Kevin Smith for an Academy Award, Dogma's take on religion (which has aged really well) would've been the way to go.

Oscar’s Choice: Alan Ball's win here was inevitable.  The era where winning Best Picture came with matching directing & writing statues was coming to an end (3 of the previous 4 years had failed in that department), but American Beauty is the kind of movie that gets a writing statue, especially with its competition being as unusual as Being John Malkovich and The Sixth Sense.

My Choice: I said at the top that I couldn't decide who should win, and the contenders for the statue (for me) are American Beauty and The Sixth Sense.  I think that American Beauty has better plot structure, but fails its ending, while The Sixth Sense doesn't have as insightful of takes, but sticks the landing better.  I think a script needs to be a complete package, though, and so I'm going to change my mind on what I initially had at #1 and instead give it to The Sixth Sense, just barely over Alan Ball's work (both will be high on my My Ballot list).  Behind them (in order) are Being John Malkovich, Topsy-Turvy, and then Magnolia.

Those are my thoughts-what about you?  Are you getting scared with M. Night Shyamalan & I, or do you want to sell real estate over with American Beauty?  Am I the only person who really did not get the appeal of Magnolia?  And with a host of options, are you thinking All About My Mother, Sweet & Lowdown, The Matrix, or Three Kings as the sixth place finisher?  Share your thoughts below!

Also in 1999: Foreign Language Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously, in 1999

Past Best Original Screenplay Contests: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023