If the Oscar nominations are reviewed in detail throughout almost their entire history, a clear conclusion is reached: in the category of best film they have been nominees and have even succeeded in quite a few forgettable, discreet and even frightening films. However, it is much more difficult to find abundant slips in the writing sections, especially in the one for best original screenplay, in which some of the most unique, exciting and unforgettable stories in cinema tend to coincide.
So, focusing on this last category, that of works that did not start from previously created materials, we have made a selection with some of those peculiar stories. Candidates for the award that did not end up triumphing, normally outside of any convention, with the added feature that they were available on platforms during the week prior to the awards (something, in any case, very changeable), which has led us to leave aside important titles of all times, and as different as The Man in the White Suit, The Wild Bunch, The Fisher King and memento.
the great carnival (1951) by Billy Wilder
“I never go to church, when I kneel down my stockings get bags,” said the wife in the film, faced with the possibility of resorting to divine help to save her husband, still alive, from the collapse of a mine. . Wilder, razor blades in mind, in the words of William Holden, this time did not have Charles Brackett, his leading co-writer at this time (later IAL Diamond would arrive), but Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman. The cynicism and lack of scruples of sensationalist journalism, the hysteria of the masses and the public spectacle of the agony and death of a man. The film was a failure with audiences and Wilder said years later: “Now I am too old to fool myself and say that with the great carnival I was ahead of my time.” But that’s how it was: reality and a handful of movies inspired by it confirm it. At the Oscars she won An American in Parisfantastic musical that, in terms of script, is incomparable with that of Wilder.
Available in filming.
General de la Rovere (1959), by Roberto Rossellini
A professional liar, a man accustomed to disguises, whether that of solidarity, dignity or courage to the last consequences, stars in a wartime film in which heroism is achieved by the most oblique of means. senses. “When you don’t know what the path of duty is, always choose the most difficult one”, says one of the emblematic phrases of the script written by Sergio Amidei, Diego Fabbri and Indro Montanelli, who had to give in at the Oscars to splendor in the grassby Elia Kazan. The enormous complexity of the trickster, of the scoundrel who takes advantage of the bitterness of the Italian families of those detained by the Gestapo, capable of extorting money from them at the cost of their hope, and also played by another cinema myth like Vittorio de Sica, resides in a disturbing nuance: he is never aware of cheating them, only of selling them comfort. He cannot live without Rossellini.
Available in flixole.
Return to the future (1985) by Robert Zemeckis
The fantastic initial idea for the film came from Bob Gale and, within its gear of effervescent, light science fiction and youth comedy, it included a component of reflection with a dangerous response: if you had met your father in high school, would you have made friends with you? A perverse premise that Gale and Zemeckis themselves developed with enormous grace, infinite power of seduction, hilarious dialogues and various mirror situations between life in the present and that of the past, in the fifties, which admit not a few double readings. “The appropriate question is: when the hell are they?” And compared to the excessive seriousness (and even difficulty) of contemporary science fiction with light objectives, but grandiose explanations, the expository simplicity of the flux condenser is wonderful. Five films opted for the best original script of that year: Back to the Future, The Purple Rose of Cairo, The Official Story, Brazil and the final winner sole witness.
Available in Netflix, filming, Movistar Plus+ and Amazon Prime Video.
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) by Woody Allen
In that same year, with the script of sole witness As the winner, Allen had composed the indelible dream of any movie fan, in this case, that of a woman during the Great Depression: the protagonist leaving the screen to start a conversation with her, a relationship, who knows what. Now that breaking the fourth wall seems to be in fashion, the one that separates us from the lives of the characters, this means the end. in the fantastic The modern Sherlock Holmes (1924), Buster Keaton had already devised, during a projectionist’s dream, for him to get into the film he was showing. And Allen, who has always said that he needs to know where he is going before discovering the path to follow to achieve his goal in the stories, since he is afraid that even a great idea will end up diluting after a dozen pages, he turns it around. Keaton’s concept and develops a masterful story in which the role of Mia Farrow must finally choose between reality and fantasy.
Available in filming.
comancheria (2016), by David MacKenzie
A western with cowboys and bank robberies, with a fight to the death between the outlaw and the established power, but in our contemporary times, and set in the America that Donald Trump appealed to for his victory in the 2016 elections. Classic Western movies are not those of the preferred ones, the evictions and the alarming rises in the Euribor, but they could well be, according to the ideologue of this masterpiece of American social and genre cinema: the superb Taylor Sheridan, for whom the The secret of writing is breaking the rules of the structure that he learned working for television, and that he says he writes very fast after building it very slowly in his head. Mackenzie put a script about the violent rebellion of a couple of guys fed up with having a hard time in a time not suitable for antiheroes into fierce images: “Even a blind pig sometimes finds a truffle”. The winner of the award was Kenneth Lonergan, for the painful manchester by the sea.
Available in Amazon Prime Video.
my night with maud (1969), by Eric Rohmer
A camera film with just four characters, in which he does not stop talking, set in a large part of his story in a strange living room-bedroom, and in which he reflects with astonishing complexity on Pascal —in his double metaphysical and mathematics—, on Jansenism and on Catholicism, nominated for an Oscar along with works such as love story and patton, which was the winner. They were the extraordinary and daring years of the New Hollywood, also at the ceremony. A don Juan without art to be it and, at the same time, austere and devout Christian, he finds himself confronted on a snowy night with a divorced liberal with emotional intelligence by arrobas, in the third of the moral tales from Rohmer. And the beautiful sensation of seeing how four professional actors and actresses interpret a closed text as if they were improvising it right at that moment.
Available in filming.
The great Dictator (1940), by Charlie Chaplin
The main goal of the script was to “laugh at Hitler”, to ridicule him. And not now, which is easy, but then, even before the start of World War II, when it was written. However, as he says in his autobiography, Chaplin would not have made it if he had known what would later be perpetrated in the death camps: “In that case he would not have made a mockery of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” . The contrast between a Jewish barber and the crazy and bloodthirsty Nazi Astolfo Hinkel, dictator of Tomania, both played by Chaplin, finds its last reflection in the famous final speech: “The hatred of men will pass away, dictators will die, and the power that took away from the people, it will return to the people. And while men die, freedom will never perish. Nominated for five Oscars, it left empty and the award for best screenplay went to the also exceptional Preston Sturges from the great mcginty.
Available in Movistar Plus+, filming and Acontra+.
Magnolia (1999) by Paul Thomas Anderson
With his usual compassionate look at the characters, and the songs of Aimee Mann as his spiritual guide, including a beautiful and uplifting musical sequence with his creatures crying out for a cure for their sorrows, Anderson crafted a script driven by a systematic that few directors develop with his mastery: visual writing. He doesn’t just write with words; he does it by means of successive images and concepts, which include both text and figuration, sound and music. All in perfect harmony. The rain of frogs in chapter eight, verse two, of the book of Exodus acts as a climax in the form of a plague for a contemporary epic with a thunderous choral sense, with twenty main characters who intertwine their lives, and an intimate sense of prodigious lucidity. Alan Ball was the winner for american beauty, in a year in which the other nominees were Charlie Kaufman, M. Night Shyamalan and Mike Leigh. Almost nothing.
Available on HBO and Movistar Plus+.
Three advertisements on the outskirts (2017), by Martin McDonagh
On the one hand, the rage of a mother broken by the rape and murder of a daughter, and impotent because the police don’t seem to make the slightest effort to solve the case. On the other, the black sense of humor of the British playwright Martin McDonagh. Are both things reconcilable? The film proves it: dark and light, deep and funny, delicate and violent, socially revealing and generically contrived. Three advertisements on the outskirts it is many things at once. For McDonagh, an admirer of the films of Nicolas Roeg and of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the dramatic formulas and structures of script manuals are “fucking boring.” So the creative challenge was different: not to turn that character into a sentimental, motherly and pleasant woman, but into someone truly three-dimensional. Let me outby Jordan Peele, won the screenplay award.
Available in Disney+.
The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie (1972), by Luis Bunuel
A gang of friends goes out to dinner and does not make it throughout the film despite going through houses to which they had been invited, restaurants and various venues, as a kind of the exterminating angel culinary and bawdy, and just as absurd. Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, his co-writer, wrote five versions of the script in search of a balance between the daily logic of the situation and the accumulation of unexpected obstacles for the long-awaited dinner, and they had a mutual right of veto when writing together. . A pact that came from a previous sensation of the Aragonese director, based on artistic sanity and modesty, and that few artists of his prestige endure when they are at the top: the need to be contradicted. Meanwhile, when viewed, abundant motifs from Buñuel’s cinema come together in this anarchic and lustful, perfidious and comical work: coffins and wakes; the diners in front of a table and an unconventional conversation; the habits of priests, priests and bishops; crosses, shoes, pianos, eroticism, bare legs… The candidate, a notable political satire with Robert Redford, stole the screenplay award from them; instead, they did get the Oscar for best foreign language film (for France).
Available in filming.
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