Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

The nominees...



All Quiet on the Western Front
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Living
Top Gun: Maverick
Women Talking

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Out of these, I have only seen Glass Onion and Top Gun Maverick, neither of which had Oscar worthy screenplays, in my opinion. Women Talking will likely win this.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Yeah, Glass Onion here kinda bums me out. Feels like it's coasting on reputation/expectation/whatever.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Wait a second, why is Glass Onion considered adapted? I have vague memories of the Writers Guild having weirdly strict rules about this kind of thing, but I also remember the Oscars being less strict, and I can't remember any specific quirk or rule that explains this one.

Using previous characters, or in this case character.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Man, that seems pretty stupid in this context. I sorta get it, but come on.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Wow.

Just wow.

I've seen Top Gun and Glass Onion and I wouldn't have nominated either, let alone give them a wib.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure this will to Women Talking.

The Academy has a tendency to award respected novelists and playwrights who deign to work in film. I suppose to legitimize their own artform by hitching to others? Sometimes it is for adapting their own work, as in Peter Shaffer for Amadeus, Ernest Thompson for On Golden Pond, Christopher Hampton for Dangerous Liaisons, Alfred Uhry for Driving Miss Daisy, Michael Black and Dances with Wolves, John Irving for The Cider House Rules, and Florian Zeller and The Father. They may even reward novelists adapting work not their own as with Larry McMurtry adapting Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. All of that would seem to bode well for Kazuo Ishiguro. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning author and Living is his first Oscar nomination. Though Ruth Prawer Jhabvala got a nomination for adapting his novel The Remains of the Day (1993) for James Ivory. Living is a reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Ikiru (1952). Is the pedigree of a Japanese-born English novelist anglicizing an original Kurosawa going to be enough to overcome the fact that Living is likely the least-seen of the five nominees?




No Pulitzer Prize winners had anything to do with Top Gun: Maverick and its screenplay is hardly one of the chief elements one thinks of when decoding its popularity and box office success. For a belated sequel the five-man team credited with the script do an admirable job (pun intended there, Iceman). It used to be almost unheard of for teams of three or more screenwriters to even be nominated for Oscars much less win, but with Spike Lee and his three co-writers winning for BlacKkKlansman, Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash for The Descendants, and Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson & Fran Walsh winning for LOTR: The Return of the King in the Adapted category and Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly & Nick Vallelonga for Green Book and Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu and his three cohorts for Birdman on the Original side, while it is still not exactly common it isn’t unheard of, either. Though as you can see from that list, the film’s directors were involved in all of those Oscar-winning screenplays and it should be noted that Maverick’s director, Joseph Kosinski, is not among the credited.




Speaking of three-man writing teams, Edward Berger, Lesley Paterson & Ian Stokell are credited with this newest adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Berger is the director. The original 1930 Best Picture winner was nominated for its screenplay as well, though it lost to the prison break drama The Big House. While this remake seems to be a cinch to win Best International Feature Film, it will likely not win here nor repeat as Best Picture.




Writer/director Rian Johnson has become a known Hollywood commodity in the past fifteen years or so, and while cool indies like Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and Looper built him a fanbase, his turn at the Star Wars table with Episode VIII: The Last Jedi nearly killed it. He came roaring right back with the fun throwback all-star whodunit Knives Out, which netted him his first nomination for Original Screenplay. And though he lost to Parasite it put him back in good graces. Even though the sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery only retains the Benoit Blanc character, that is enough to make this one count as an Adapted Screenplay. Unlike the original the sequel rather split its support so it seems unlikely that it would win here.




Which leaves Women Talking. Miriam Toews’ novel was adapted by the film’s director, Sarah Polley. She began her career as a child actress in Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989) and transitioned well into more adult roles in films by Atom Egoyan (Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter), Michael Winterbottom (The Claim), David Cronenberg (eXistenZ), and Doug Liman (Go) and she is known to Horror fans for starring in Zack Snyder’s reboot of The Dawn of the Dead (2004). Although her acting career was successful she moved into her true passion: filmmaking. Her debut as a writer/director was the wonderful Away from Her (2006) which got the great Julie Christie a well-earned Best Actress nomination and Sarah her first for adapting Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” (The Coen Brothers won that year for No Country for Old Men). She followed that triumph with Take This Waltz (2011) and her very interesting and personal documentary Stories We Tell (2012) about her own family’s secrets. Women Talking was shut out of any of the acting categories and for Polley’s direction, but it did manage to make the Best Picture cut and while it has less-than-no chance of winning the biggest prize of the night Polley may well hear her name called. I sure hope she does.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Have sat through each of the nominees now after today (had sat through each over the past few months, and today Women Talking), and by far Women Talking is the one I was most impressed with of those nominated. Not a super strong year in this catagory and is the one I will be hoping walks away with the honours.

Honestly amazed at All Quiet winning the BAFTA in this catagory, as it deviated so much from the source amterial that it really loses so much of it's punch, and admittedly not every adapted screenplay needs to remain faithful to the source material - Jojo Rabbit is the perfect case in point, in that the film really only covers the first half of the book - but considering each of the previous renditions of All Quiet have been far more faithful and each has had that punch that has been supplanted in this treatment and replaced needlessly and doesnt really add much to was already there.

I just saw Women Talking which puts me at 4/5 seen - and considering what it's up against, I really hope Women Talking wins this Oscar as well - it's most deserving, and miles away from the likes of Top Gun : Maverick and Glass Onion which look (read?) very poor beside it.

Haven’t seen Living yet. I picked Glass Onion. There are a couple movies here I like more, but I think that screenplay is pretty fun.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

This one is dead set for All Quiet.

The screenplay for Glass Onion is not a great screenplay in my opinion. I was quite enjoying it until near the end when it just became overrun with flashbacks. Flashbacks from a different perspective, revealing new information, fine, interesting. Flashbacks of what you've already seen in case you are too stupid to remember the story so far, not so much

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023
 

Something only just learned which added to my well-earned doubts about this adaptation of All Quiet. Apparently, when Carl Laemmie Jr (Producer) & Lewis Milestone (director) were wanting to adapt the book into a movie, they flew all the way to Germany to consult with Erich Maria Remarque, who gave his consent with the stipulation that it remain falthful to the book. Which they did - indeed why entire chunks of dialogue in the film are lifted straight from the book when they made the original adaptation in 1930.

And why subsequent adaptations have also made the effort to remain true to the original source.

So it's ironic that nearly 90 years later with this latest adaption that it has ventured so far away from that, and in many ways is so vastly unrecognizable from the book. Yet the irony of it has already been acclaimed for it's adapted screenplay during this award season is palpable. For all of the good aspects of this latest version of All Quiet, even being nominated in this catagory seems all the more bizarre and can only imagine what Remarque would make of it all.

Sarah Polley did win the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Adapted Screenplay last night for Women Talking. The WGA has different eligibility rules than The Oscars and even sometimes has different takes on what qualifies for "adapted" and "original", making the two organizations' awards not especially useful as predictors. Polley is facing only two of the same films come Oscar night (Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick). The WGA added Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and She Said to the fray while the Academy's Writer's Branch went with All Quiet on the Western Front and Living.

I still both think and hope Polley wins next week.

I have now seen 4 out of the 5 nominees in this category. Haven't seen Living, but I'm still going out on a limb and saying that this award should go to Women Talking. The film's only other nomination is Best Picture and it's definitely not winning that.

Sarah Polley did indeed win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Re: Oscar's Best Adapted Screenplay 2023