Best Original Screenplays Oscar Winners
Compare the movies that have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards to those that have taken home Best Original Screenplay and you’ll find that, as often as not, the latter is the more impressive list. Sometimes they overlap, but when they don’t — “Pulp Fiction†and “Forrest Gump,†“Talk to Her†and “Chicago,†“Melvin and Howard†and “Ordinary People†— it almost feels like a tacit admission that the Academy is throwing a bone to the film that’ll be more fondly remembered than the ultimate winner.
It only makes sense, then, that any number of great filmmakers have been honored in this category without ever winning Best Director or Picture: Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze. These wordsmiths are worth celebrating, and these are the best — and worst — of them since 2000.
Crash – It likely comes as little surprise that Paul Haggis’ surprise Best Picture winner takes last place on this list, as it tends to whenever discussions of the least-worthy Oscar winners in recent memory come up. “Brokeback Mountain†was considered the favorite, with its surprise loss being interpreted by many as a sign that Hollywood was more willing to embrace a movie condemning prejudice than one celebrating gay romance. The cross-cutting narrative, which takes place over one very racist day in Los Angeles, is treacly and contrived, with almost every one of the overlapping stories designed to tug at the heartstrings while delivering a heavy-handed message that frequently defies logic; “Crash†is still effective on a visceral level in spite of (or because of) its silliness, however, and the committed ensemble cast (especially Thandie Newton and Matt Dillon) makes the most of the material. —Michael Nordine
The King’s Speech – Tradition reigns in David Seidler’s 2011 winner, which cleverly treats King George (Colin Firth) and his stuttering affliction as the stuff of great drama — and, for George, it very much was — without falling into parody or melodrama. A two-hander that requires a pair of great actors to make every line tick by (even the ones that are understandably tough to get out), Seidler’s script — born partially of a years-long obsession with the bond between the king and speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) — is both hugely entertaining and meticulously researched. It’s also the kind of inspirational story that can be derided as cheesy or crowd-pleasing, but what’s wrong with that? Seidler, a former stammerer himself, found something special in both the king’s desire to do better and the man that helped him do just that — a classic story with some very unique touches that should inspire everyone to speak out, in whichever way they can. —Kate Erbland
Little Miss Sunhsine - It’s not every year a movie comes along that is so original, packing a double wallop of humor and heart, that it makes stars out of everyone involved. Such was the case with the joyous “Little Miss Sunshine,†which introduced Abigail Breslin and Paul Dano, announced Steve Carell as a serious actor, earned Alan Arkin his first Oscar, and launched the careers of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and screenwriter Michael Arndt. Proving there’s nothing audiences love more than a dysfunctional family in a vintage Volkswagen, what is most impressive about Arndt’s bittersweet ensemble comedy is the attention character. There isn’t a dud among the bunch, in terms of complexity. Each member of the family carry their own quirks and pain in equal measure; they’re so expertly drawn that it seems all Arndt had to was stick them in a van together and let them figure out the rest. Through the generations, Arndt sheds light on the wisdom of youth, the folly of old age, and the malaise of middle age. At the heart of it all: yearning — and a little bit of sunshine. —Jude Dry
Juno - Diablo Cody’s dialogue in “Juno†is so crack-of-the-whip sharp and delightfully idiosyncratic that it’s one of the rare indie films that had mainstream audiences quoting it for months. Cody crafted an indelible heroine in Ellen Page’s eponymous youngster, a motormouthed teenager who hides hear fears and anxieties under an exterior of alternative sass and snappy comebacks. A lot of what makes “Juno†such a charmer is the way the dialogue flows from character to character. It owes as much to the peculiarity of Wes Anderson as it does to the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare. —Zack Sharf
Django - The “d†may be silent, but nothing else in Quentin Tarantino revenge drama is. One of the oft-controversial auteur’s most controversial outings, “Django Unchained†is, by several metrics, also his most successful: It made a killing at the box office to the tune of $425 million worldwide, received critical acclaim, and won QT his second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. That this remains the only category in which the referential wordsmith has won is a testament to his abilities as a scribe, one whose endlessly quotable dialogue has practically become a genre unto itself; here Tarantino reminds us once again that, though often imitated, he’s yet to be replicated. His liberal use of that word understandably remains a deal-breaker for some, and Tarantino isn’t exactly known for extending an olive branch to his critics. If that approach has resulted in some oversights along the way, however, it’s also helped him create a one-of-a-kind body of work in each each piece is as remarkable as the whole.
hurtlocker - One of the most memorable lines in “The Hurt Locker†is never spoken aloud: “War is a drug.†Mark Boal took that observation from Tara McKelvey as the epigraph to his screenplay, and from it he crafted what many others had tried and failed before him: an Iraq War movie that resonated with audiences. He also began a fruitful partnership with Kathryn Bigelow, resulting in the even-better “Zero Dark Thirty†and this year’s “Detroitâ€; the two are so in tune with one another that it’s now difficult to imagine one working without the other. Boal’s ground-level view of the conflict focuses on the bombs buried in the ground and the unlucky souls tasked with excavating them, namely Jeremy Renner’s William James; for all the white-knuckle tension, though, the film’s best scene takes place far from the battlefield. After returning home as a civilian, James talks to his young son about love. “The older you get, the fewer things you really love,†he says, “and by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.†We know what he’s talking about, of course, and why he’ll never truly leave the war.
eternal sunshine of the spotless - It’s no coincidence that, by working together, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry made the most successful movie of either of their careers. Put two visionaries together, and they’re bound to bring out the best in each other. It’s too romantic a concept for Kaufman to have conceived on his own, which explains the shared story credit with Gondry and French conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth. Still, there’s no mistaking Jim Carrey’s Joel Barish for anything other than a Kaufman creation, with his hangdog look and hapless aura. We’ll have to forgive him for birthing the original manic pixie dream girl, and besides, Clementine has more chutzpah than her more cloying descendants. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but something is always lost in translation. There is something intangibly appealing about the high-concept romance, which blended Kaufman’s melancholic surrealism with Gondry’s whimsical warmth. It was a perfect marriage that neither artist ever replicated on their own.
https://www.indiewire.com/2018/01/best-original-screenplay-oscar-winners-ranked-21st-century-1201911611/