What a year it has been for him. Awards season is now in full swing en route to cinema’s biggest night, the 96th Academy Awards. We’ve now got our hands on all the nominees, and despite a couple of letdowns, the race is mighty strong.
The biggest surprise among the list of nods for Best Adapted Screenplay was the absence of Killers of the Flower Moon, the Martin Scorsese Western crime drama epic, written by the veteran filmmaker and Oscar winner screenwriter Eric Roth.
American Fiction
Cord Jefferson scored big in his feature debut, which he both directed and wrote, landing five Academy Awards for American Fiction, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. The biting and often hilarious examination of Black stereotypes in media is based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett and follows Best Actor nominee Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated novelist who accidentally becomes famous from a book he wrote as a satire of everything he despises.
American Fiction is only showing in theaters. No VOD or streaming date has been put forth by distributors Amazon or MGM Studios for now.
Barbie
The nominations for the year’s biggest film were all over the place at the 2024 Oscars. Unfortunately, Greta Gerwig couldn’t secure a nomination for her directing, but at least she and her other half Noah Baumbach were recognized for their screenplay. The fantasy comedy film about America’s most famous doll wasn’t affected by the last-minute switch from Original to Adapted Screenplay, based on the Academy’s differing rules from those of the Writers Guild of America.
Everyone and their mothers have probably watched Barbie at this point, but just in case you’re still catching up, it’s available to stream on Max. You can also buy or rent it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, and all other usual spots.
Oppenheimer
The latter half of Barbenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic about the Father of the Atomic Bomb is one of the favorites to score big at this year’s Academy Awards. Leading the nominations with a whopping 13 nods, the Universal Pictures feature couldn’t miss out on Best Adapted Screenplay.
Christopher Nolan himself gets full credit for the script, which was unorthodoxly written in the first person and with lead actor Cillian Murphy in mind from the get-go. It’s based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and traces Oppenheimer’s life from a college student to the director of the Manhattan Project and his persecution by the U.S. government later in life.
Poor Things
If I had a nickel for every time a collaboration between screenwriter Tony McNamara, director Yorgos Lanthimos, and star Emma Stone took the Oscars by storm I’d have exactly two nickels. It’s not much, but it’s really exciting that it’s happened twice. Poor Things is the trio’s second time all working together following the 2018 masterpiece that is The Favourite and it has resulted in 11 Academy Award nominations (three more than its predecessor). McNamara wrote the screenplay from the eponymous 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray.
In this Frankensteinian steampunk outrageous comedy, Stone plays Bella, a young woman who’s been resurrected with a new infant brain and must rediscover the entire world. It’s provocative and eccentric, and worth your time. The only way to watch it for now is in theaters. The film has no streaming or VOD release dates as yet.
The Zone of Interest
Rounding up the list of Best Adapted Screenplay nominees is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which he both directed and wrote. The American-British-Polish co-production takes from the 2014 novel by Martin Amis of the same title about a Nazi family building an idyllic home next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Described as a ruthless examination of humankind’s complacency in the face of terror, this historical drama is only available to watch in theaters and has not been granted a digital release date.
The Oscars air on Sunday, Mar. 10, on ABC.