Let me start off by saying I have no problem with Spotlight winning the Best Picture Oscar. I believe the movie works and the true best movie of the nominees (Room) was too small to give the big award to. Where I get upset is that Spotlight won best original screenplay for a screenplay that wasn’t difficult to write. It’s the most straight-forward narrative of all straight-forward narratives. “Go… get… bad guys.” It’s almost “Taken” but with reporters instead of an ex-CIA agent (and somehow less character development).
And the reason it won despite this continues to be one of the Academy’s biggest weaknesses. They will always weight social issues and a “message” over skill. Always. Inside Out was a kid’s movie. It’s message was “people aren’t always happy.” That doesn’t have the same weight as, “Priests are raping children.” So even though Inside Out, as a screenplay, was 100 times more complicated to write, it lost out to an issue. And I think that sucks. Because I thought the whole idea of an Oscar was to give it to the people who were the most deserving. And instead it was given to the people who performed a straight-forward transcription of an important story.
Luckily, the Academy made up for this mistake by awarding The Big Short Best Adapted Screenplay. And the great thing about that movie was it had both of these things. It was an important social issue and an incredibly complicated and skillful display of writing. It did not have a single protagonist. It didn’t even have a single group protagonist. It had multiple group protagonists. It also had multiple narrators. Multiple narratives. It also broke the fourth wall, and not with one character, like Deadpool or Ferris Bueller, but with multiple characters, which is, like, the “do not do this under any circumstances” rule of all screenwriting rules. It was a script that broke so many rules, I lost count. But it also anchored its narrative so strongly in tried-and-true storytelling techniques (underdog protags, an evil entity that we had to see go down) that it worked. A truly great script.
Okay, feel free to discuss all the Oscar winners and losers, as well as the show itself. Oh, and kudos to the Academy for putting screenwriting awards first and foremost. That was a nice surprise. :)
