Ranking the Last 20 Adapted Screenplay Oscar Winners: Part 2

Here is an inspiring fact: Call Me By Your Name screenwriter James Ivory was 89 when the movie came out in 2017. Ivory, of course, is no stranger to lush stories of longing in beautiful places. And while this was more shabby academics on holiday than well-heeled expats, the basic idea still plays: wanting someone you shouldn’t want, getting them, and lo and behold the things that made it a bad idea are still there. It is just so painful and lovely. And Michael Stuhlberg gets a monologue that I think about often.

Adapting a 150 year old slave narrative, whose authorship/transcription is somewhat disputed is not easy. 12 Years a Slave is brutal and beautiful, harrowing and horrible. I’m glad, though, that the Academy recognized the script, because it was the relationships between the characters, and the various ramifications of the permutations of those relationships, that gave this tour through hell of our own making a humanity that the machinery of slavery was built to destroy.

In many ways, this is what I want from a screenplay. Sharp characters, terrific lines, and memorable scene after memorable scene. Flawed characters that we fall in love with all the more because of the specificity of their foibles. Chances are you’ve drank much more Pinot Noir than you would have if Sideways didn’t make it a sensation. It’s a testament to writing that Sideways is the rare comedy to take home the Oscar in this (or really any) category.

I finally caught this on a plane last summer and was completely blown away. It had been awhile since I read the novel, but something about the theater-like setting of the barn intensified the dialogue and interactions between women in a way I wasn’t expecting. I am sure others have compared it to 12 Angry Men, and I wish more movies would realize that a group of people talking passionately about something urgent makes for a great movie.

Books have it a little easier when representing long stretches of time—say over the course of a lifetime. Part of it is that reading a book for ten hours is just longer than watching a movie for two, especially since that ten hours is likely spread out over several days (or more). You are with the characters longer, so the passage of time feels a little more real as well. With a movie, you have the added problem of needing multiple actors to play a kid and an adult (and sometimes different actors as adults even). The tripartite structure of Moonlight picks takes the challenge head on, following not just one but two characters over decades and across actors. To do this well, you have to pick the right scenes and write them well. So that each feels a part of a whole, but meaningfully dense on its own. I think Moonlight does this so well that it goes unnoticed. But it shouldn’t.

I moved this one around. A lot. I could make a case for it being #1. Also could make a case that McCarthy really did the work and the Coens just didn’t screw it up. No Country has characters you can’t look away from. Dialogue so good that it can make you forget there is a gun in the room (this is the opposite of Tarantino who always writes around the gun in the room). There aren’t a lot of changes to the book, but that is no guarantee of anything. The Sheriff (Jones) and Chigurh (Bardem) are both sharpened rather than dulled, though in that sharpening perhaps simplified as well.