Best Screenplay 1988

[Big Magilla]

Having won the New York Film Critics Award and the National Board of Review Award for Best Screenplay and the Writers Guild Award for Best Original Screenplay, Bull Durham should have been a no-brainer for the Oscar's Original Screenplay win. Instead it lost in the Best Picture-Director-Actor sweep of Rain Man, which was the social conscience film of day having put the spotlight on the previously little covered topic of autism. Did it deserve the nomination? Maybe. Did it deserve the nomination over Big? Maybe. Did it deserve the win over A Fish Called Wanda? A resounding yes on that one, but over Bull Durham and Working Girl? No way. Better than the screenplays for A Fish Called Wanda, Big and Rain Man were the non-nominated original screenplays for Best Foreign Film nominees Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Salaam Bombay! and the curiously ignored altogether, The Wings of Desire.

I have no argument against Christopher Hampton's superb adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses except that his hard work was in adapting the novel for the stage. Adapting his own stage play for the screen had to have been a piece of cake in comparison. The winner here should have been Philip Kaufman and Jean-Claude Carriere's superb The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Little Dorrit, Gorillas in the Mist and The Accidental Tourist were all fine nominees but so would have been The Last Temptation of Christ, Dead Ringers and A Cry in the Dark.