Oscar's Best Original Screenplay 2022

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Which gets your vote for Best Original Screenplay?
63.64%
7 votes
Belfast
9.09%
1 votes
Don't Look Up
0%
0 votes
King Richard
27.27%
3 votes
Licorice Pizza
0%
0 votes
The Worst Person in the World
11 votes. You may not vote on this poll




The five original scripts going for Oscar gold are...



Belfast
Don't Look Up
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
The Worst Person in the World
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Licorice Pizza was an enjoyable film overall. PTA should win this one.
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If I had to guesstimate I’d say about a quarter of Don’t Look Up’s support came from voters who truly grooved to it (or were in it, as it had such a large cast), another quarter from those who are loyal fans of Adam McKay no matter what, and about half or more of the support came directly in the face of the backlash and supposed controversies in the media. It got kicked enough that voters became so either protective or defiant that it got a couple of high-profile nominations for Best Picture and here for Original Screenplay. This is McKay’s third nomination as a writer. His Dick Chaney piece Vice got a nod as an Original Screenplay and he won Adapted for The Big Short. The inconsistent tone of Don’t Look Up hurts it much more than any polemic diatribes ever could. No way the sentiment that got it a nomination propels it to a win, but McKay should feel loved and protected.




Zach Baylin, who before this project worked as a set dresser and prop master, sees his very first screen writing credit King Richard make him an Oscar nominee. Now he’s working on Creed III. Will Smith is very likely riding this movie to an Oscar win but it has no realistic chance here.




The Worst Person in the World was a surprise nominee here, but it would take an even bigger surprise for it to actually win. Only a small number of scripts from foreign language projects have been winners for their screenplay. In the 21st Century Parasite, Roma, and Talk to Her all won but before that you have to go back to the likes of Divorce Italian Style, Claude Lalouche’s A Man and a Woman, The Red Balloon (which famously has no dialogue), and the very first was the Swiss-German production of Marie-Louise (1945). Very unlikely The Worst Person joins them, though the nomination truly was a nice reward.

Which makes it a two-horse race.




Licorice Pizza is Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth writing nomination, so far without a win. The others were the scripts for Boogie Nights (Good Will Hunting won), Magnolia (American Beauty won), There Will Be Blood (No Country for Old Men won), and Inherent Vice (The Imitation Game won). He will almost surely win one of these days, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see him win as a writer before he wins as a director. But I don’t know if Licorice Pizza is the one?




Belfast’s nomination here set a record for Kenneth Branagh. It makes the SEVENTH different category he has been nominated in. Nobody in the history of the Oscars has pulled that off before. Those categories are Best Director (Henry V and Belfast), Best Actor (Henry V), Best Short Film, Live Action (“Swan Song”, a Chekov one-act starring John Gielgud), Adapted Screenplay (Hamlet), Supporting Actor (My Week with Marilyn), Best Picture (as producer on Belfast), and Original Screenplay (Belfast). Kenneth never won any of those previous and diverse nominations. He is probably not going to upset Jane Campion for Director nor will Belfast get Picture so the nicest way to honor both his career and the personal film is right here. Branagh was twenty-nine when he got those Henry V noms. He is sixty-one now. It may be time.



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I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
The odd thing is that both Licorice Pizza and Belfast work more as a collection of connected scenes in the lives of their characters than a clear story-driven narrative.



The trick is not minding
The odd thing is that both Licorice Pizza and Belfast work more as a collection of connected scenes in the lives of their characters than a clear story-driven narrative.
Screenplay isn’t necessarily the same thing as best story. Screenplay has so much written into it such as specific instructions for the actors and specific descriptions of the scenes. The academy looks at the writing, ostensibly, when they nominate these, not so much the story. If that makes sense



Welcome to the human race...
Licorice Pizza is my favourite of the nominees but I don't think that kind of breezy slice-of-life script is the kind that's liable to actually win on the night. Can't say I'm fond of the idea of it going to Belfast, though I suppose that's still preferable to Don't Look Up.
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I don't see Licorice Pizza winning this or any other award...I think the film is severely overrated and I can't think of a single Paul Thomas Anderson film that is not superior to it.





The WGA Awards were last night and the writers named Don't Look Up their Best Original Screenplay. That doesn't necessarily help or hurt its Oscar chances. The WGA Awards started in 1949 making them, along with the DGA, the longest running of the industry guild ceremonies. But tracking its correlation to the Oscar is complicated because for the first couple decades the WGA gave out three separate sets of awards for dramas, for comedies, and for musicals and the Academy used to have a separate category for Best Story in addition to the Best Screenplays. The Best Original Screenplay award at the WGA standardized as a single category in 1968. But even then there are hiccups in comparing it to the Oscars as the two bodies have different eligibility rules, going so far as sometimes one body considers a script original while the other deems the same script adapted.

This year Branagh's Belfast was ineligible for the WGA. The three overlapping nominees for the WGA and Oscar were Don't Look Up, King Richard, and Licorice Pizza.

With all of that being said, the two awards matched in three of the past five years, including last year's Promising Young Woman, Parasite before that, and Get Out four years ago. Three years ago Bo Burnham won the WGA for Eighth Grade and was not even nominated for the Oscar (Green Book won) and five years ago was one of those weird ones where Barry Jenkins won the WGA Original Screenplay for Moonlight but was eligible for and won Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars (Manchester by the Sea won Original).


I still think the Oscar is going to Branagh this year.





Ken Branagh did in fact win Best Original Screenplay, the only of Belfast's seven nominations to bring home a trophy. P.T. Anderson will have to wait at least one more project to become an Oscar winner himself.