Unlike Best Adapted Screenplay, this one is much more difficult to call this time around.
This is a category that can march hand-in-hand with the Best Picture winner. In the last ten years winners here that matched the top award are
Spotlight, Birdman, The King's Speech, and
The Hurt Locker. But more often in the last couple decades, it goes to something a little more off the beaten path, sometimes a movie that wasn't even nominated for Best Picture, with recent winners this century including
Manchester by the Sea, Her, Django Unchained, Milk, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lost in Translation,
Talk to Her, and
Gosford Park.
Even with a bit of backlash and awards season fatigue as the front runner,
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri still appears to be the favorite for Best Picture or be running nearly neck and neck with
Shape of Water, but its screenplay, written by the director Martin McDonagh, may have a much tougher time winning. McDonagh did not make the cut as Best Director, despite his DGA Award nomination, which might tend to bolster his argument for winning here. And perhaps if three of the other four nominees weren't also writer/directors that would give him an advantage. But I don't think it does. He has one previous nomination for his screenplay for
In Bruges, and the kind of success he has enjoyed with
Three Billboards should get his subsequent projects a lot of attention, win or lose.
McDonagh does at least have better odds of winning than Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon for turning their real-life unlikely coma romance into
The Big Sick. The movie was a charmer and it is good to see them get the nomination, but they have no real shot at winning. Other than Woody Allen, who is a force all of his own, Nanjiani joins rare company of former stand up comedians nominated for a screenplay Oscar, joining Steve Coogan (
Philomena) and Barry Levinson (
Diner and
Avalon) - and to be fair Levinson abandoned his stand-up career pretty early on and was never anything approaching a star in that field, its more of a footnote. But Kumail Nanjiani beats people like Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy as well as his friend and the
Big Sick's producer Judd Apatow to an Oscar nomination for writing.
As compelling as their story and the resulting film are, the odds of them winning are beyond slim. But if they can turn their sensibility towards tales that they didn't actually live through, perhaps they can enjoy this kind of success again? But this may be their one shot basking in the glow of an Oscar nomination.
Guillermo del Toro had one other Oscar nomination before this year, his Original Screnplay for
Pan's Labyrinth (which lost to
Little Miss Sunshine).
Pan's Labyrinth had six nominations, winning for Best Cinematography, Best At Direction, and Best Makeup.
The Shape of Water leads all films this year with thirteen nominations, one short of the record of fourteen set by
All About Eve, Titanic, and last year's
La La Land. Del Toro may well win Best Director and it may clean up in the technical categories, but it is probably going to finish mid-pack here for Original Screenplay. It is certainly an original take on the romantic fantasy, complete with Guillermo's fascinations with the grotesque and bizarre, but if his personal vision is going to be rewarded it will be as Best Director.
Jordan Peele won the WGA Award for
Get Out, going up against three of its competitors here (
The Big Sick, The Shape of Water, Lady Bird) plus
I, Tonya instead of
Three Billboards. Last year the WGA and Oscar winners didn't match here, but largely because both bodies differed on what constituted an original vs. an adapted work. Kenneth Lonergan won the WGA Award, but Barry Jenkins, who won the WGA for Original Screenplay, won the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay for
Moonlight. The previous year the two awards matched (
Spotlight) as well as in 2014 (
Her) and 2012 (
Midnight in Paris), but there were splits in 2015 (
The Grand Budapest Hotel/
Birdman), 2013 (
Zero Dark Thirty/
Django Unchained), and 2010 (
Inception/
The King's Speech). So as a predictor of late, the WGA is not so hot, about as good as a coin flip.
But Jordan Peele definitely has an excellent shot at winning the Oscar. He also has a nomination as Best Director, and while he is not the favorite there nor is
Get Out expected to win Best Picture, this would be the perfect way to reward the sketch comedian and TV star who's satirical hybrid became a smash hit and catapulted him into Oscar contention.
The reason this one is too close to call is that Greta Gerwig and
Lady Bird may win for basically all the reasons
Get Out may win. A writer/director who has a Best Director nomination but who is not a favorite to win there or in Best Picture, if those Academy voters couldn't bring themselves to quite vote for the film in those categories, a Best Original Screenplay Oscar would be a mighty fine consolation prize. Like Peele this is her first nomination in this category. The indie darling of an actress has written other screenplays, going back to being credited on Joe Swanberg's improvised
Hannah Takes the Stairs which was the project that first got her noticed, and co-writing both
Frances Ha and
Mistress America with director and then boyfriend Noah Baumbach.
Lady Bird is all Gerwig, and the semi-autobiographical movie has made her a hot commodity, coincidentally timing out perfectly against the backdrop of the new post-Harvey Weinstein era. If Ridley Scott having to reshoot
All the Money in the World served as the best example of how the seemingly endless scandals and revelations effected projects negatively,
Lady Bird became an embodiment of the kind of course correction and new voices in the fore that the industry is now clamoring for (along with the critical and box office success of
Wonder Woman).
And that really makes this category too close to call. Both Peele and Gerwig had debuts as writer/directors that were pleasant surprises, and they both got their triple-threat creds certified by going behind the camera and getting nominations as writers and directors. Peele's film takes some pointed satirical jabs at the racial climate couched in a thriller, while Gerwig's wasn't designed to address the current zeitgeist, but its timing put it right there. Peele's film, though it works wonderfully as a horror/thriller, is more overtly political by design than Gerwig's, which could be either a boon or a hindrance. Or will those two split votes so dramatically and evenly that Guillermo del Toro or Martin McDonagh sneaks through on the weighted ballot?
We'll know in a few weeks.
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