How Does the Writing Stack Up?

There are ten Oscar nominated screenplays and nine movies nominated for Best Picture.  The screenplays nominated, but not as Best Picture include Flight and Moonrise Kingdom, whereas the Best Picture nominations include Les Misérables, not nominated for its screenplay.

Conventional wisdom is that a script should be between 90 to 110 pages in length, follow a strict structure, have a strong theme, a clear plot with unexpected twists, and deliver pithy dialogue.  Sticking to that formula makes a script typical, and a movie watchable.  The Oscar Nominated Screenplays push this envelope, no doubt, but one thing they sure do:  adhere to structure — most of the time.

The Oscar Nominations are:

• Original Screenplay: Amour, Django Unchained, Flight, Moonrise Kingdom and Zero Dark Thirty.
• Adapted Screenplay: Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life of Pi, Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook.

The commentaries in this blog for each of the five Original Screenplays and the five Adapted Screenplays compares them to the standard structural framework developed by Blake Snyder.  These analyses really do not include more spoilers than you would get from seeing the trailers for each of the movies but do give you a taste of how the movie is made.

Links to each of the screenplays are included at the end of each commentary, but they may not be available shortly after the Oscar Ceremony.  If you want to read any of the actual scripts, it is suggested you download it from there.

The Writers Guild of America awards will be handed out on February 17th.  The WGA did not nominate Amour or Django Unchained in the Original Screenplay category or Beasts of the Southern Wild for Adapted Screenplay. Looper, The Master, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower were the selected nominees instead.