Best Screenplay 2011

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What were the Best Original and Adapted Screenplays of 2011?

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
1
2%
Bridesmaids (Kristen Wiig, Annie Mumolo)
2
3%
Margin Call (J.C. Chandor)
0
No votes
Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)
4
7%
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
25
42%
The Descendants (Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash)
5
8%
Hugo (John Logan)
0
No votes
The Ides of March (George Clooney, Grant Hslov, Beau Willimon)
1
2%
Moneyball (Steve Zallian, Aaron Sorkin, Stan Servin)
6
10%
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Bridget O'Connor, Peter Staughan)
15
25%
 
Total votes: 59

Okri
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by Okri »

We often give the writers credit. After they tick the boxes of the best picture candidates, they tend to go for a nice mixture of “not-quite-best-pictures” and smaller efforts where the screenplay is clearly the thing. This is less true in the age of “ten” of course and these line-ups seem more underwhelming for it. That stated, each category has one true towering achievement that makes them relative no brainers for me.

Adapted screenplay is just mediocrity incarnate, though at least they had the excuse that the field wasn’t that strong within their wheelhouse. There were a couple alternatives. No film matched The Skin I Lived In for sheer narrative surprise and it’s marriage of Almodovar and various cinematic preludes made for a marvelous thriller. The adaptation of Drive was terse and smart. Coriolanus is my favourite underrated Shakespeare play and the adaptation was also quite good. I also really liked Rapt.

The Ides of March and The Descendants are actively terrible. Hugo is solid, though I came in with a great deal of affection for the novel. Moneyball is efficient. But Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is just a marvel. It manages to be a brilliant combination of complex and economical,

The field for original screenplay was just stacked: Weekend was surprisingly gentle and insightful – with a wicked sense of humour (“Are you laughing at my childhood tragedy?”). Beginners is a beautiful memory play – the combination of quirk and true emotion was just powerful. Certified Copy was exquisite. Attack the Block, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Double Hour.... man, AMPAS really dropped the ball this year.

But they did do one thing right and that was giving A Separation a nomination. It was mindbogglingly brilliant, a film that just expanded in the mind as it unfolded. Devastating and an easy vote.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by Sabin »

I just found the Nat Faxon & Jim Rash only version of The Descendants script online. There is zero voice-over. I cannot wait to read this thing because I strongly believe that inside this mawkish George Clooney vehicle there is a fantastic Louis C.K. film waiting to burst out.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by Heksagon »

Hmm... I feel like I have just written about a lot of these films.

In the Original category, A Separation is the obvious choice. The rest of the nominees are deserving also, except for one - Bridesmaids, which struck me as a kind of The Hangover for women.

In the Adapted category, it’s a choice between The Descendants and Tinker Tailor. I went with the former, which I liked a lot more than most people here.

The rest of the nominees in this category didn’t really impress me. Hugo is a good film, but its strengths are in the visuals and the direction, rather than the screenplay. I see a lot of people liking Moneyball, but for me, the film felt too straight-forward and too predictable, given the premise. The Ides of March felt incredibly fake.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by The Original BJ »

Hardly a banner year in the Adapted category, though the fact that voters rejected The Help, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, War Horse, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to give nominations to the scripts they did made me overall pleased with how this category shook out.

Hugo is probably the easiest to disregard, simply because its strengths were overwhelmingly visual. But even beyond that, I found the script a little overstuffed, with too many minor subplots occupying unnecessary amounts of space.

Moneyball managed to take two subjects which interest me very little -- baseball and math -- and make them feel engaging. A lot of that had to do with the witty interplay written for Pitt and Hill. But the movie also has a sweet tinge of poignancy to it -- simple moments like that last beat of Pitt listening to his daughter's recording in the car help make the story first and foremost a character drama, not one focused simply on a mathematic approach to running a baseball team. Still, it's nothing major, and there are far more obvious places to honor Sorkin and Zaillian elsewhere.

There are also far better opportunities to honor Alexander Payne elsewhere as well. I'm sort of in the middle on The Descendants -- I neither despise it the way the Internet did, nor do I think it deserved the raves it earned from print critics. I think, as with many Payne films, that there's a lot of insightful dialogue and compelling scenes between the characters, and that the movie balances biting humor with emotional sensitivity. But from a basic plot standpoint, it just doesn't feel like all that much happens in this one, with a "climactic" moment that seems unbelievably low-key. (Gee, I'm at the edge of my seat over whether Clooney is going to sell the land or not!) I wasn't bothered by this win, but it feels unnecessary to endorse it.

I assumed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy would be the popular choice here, and I see why many have voted for it. Narratively, it's a tremendously ambitious work, but aside from just the narrative twists, there's a very pleasing melancholy air to the proceedings, as the script articulates how being a part of the international intelligence machine can come to overwhelm one's personal and emotional life. I admire the movie a lot...but I don't quite love it the way some do. At the risk of sounding like a complete dunderhead, I have to admit that I found portions of the plot line nearly impenetrable while watching it. The elliptical quality that so many of you adored in it just felt overly dense to me, and I'd have preferred a bit more clarity in the way it tied so much information together. I should probably see it again, though.

I'm the (until now) sole vote for The Ides of March here. It's not an overwhelming choice -- I tend to always have difficulty voting for play adaptations, because sometimes the amount of SCREENwriting involved can be pretty minimal. But I thought Clooney and co. opened up the material in a lot of successful ways (for instance, Clooney's character doesn't even appear in Farragut North, and the entire intern subplot is completely different), and I don't think the film feels nearly as stagebound as the majority of these types of adaptations. And, unlike many here it seems, I actually do respond to the content of the writing a lot as well. The moment when Gosling gets fired from a campaign team that has no idea the information he holds over them is a terrific moment of plot propulsion, and I found the ultimate narrative progressions to be, while not wildly unexpected, handled with suspense, insight and a lot of snappily cynical dialogue. So, I'm going to try to avoid peer pressure and stick up for The Ides of March by voting against the grain here.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by FilmFan720 »

Looking back on this list, it surprised me how much stronger this year was than I remembered.

In terms of Original Screenplay, my vote went to A Separation. I said last year that it can be tough to vote for a foreign screenplay sometimes, just because a major part of a screenplay is dialogue and relying on subtitles doesn't necessarily capture the success or failure of a film's words. In this case, though, the plot is so tight and the narrative so compelling and surprisingly intriguing that I have no problem voting for it here.

The other nominee I would have cited is Margin Call, which I find another tense narrative constructed around a plot that sounds completely uninteresting. Yes the characters are always talking like they are film characters, but that is part of the theatricality of the film. It is a big actor piece, filled with big actors, and I don't mind the clever devices when they are presented like they are here. As for the others, Midnight in Paris has some nice moments but isn't that strong as an overall narrative, Bridesmaids is an unfunny screenplay only saved by a great comedic supporting turn (Rose Byrne) and The Artist is unremarkable. I would have replaced them with Certified Copy, Margaret and either Win Win or The Beaver, which is a pretty wonderful screenplay completely misdirected by Jodie Foster.

For Adapted Screenplay, there are 3 really terrific screenplays with some filler and not a lot of alternatives. My top 3 Adapted Sreenplays of the year were all nominated: Moneyball, The Descendants and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I voted Moneyball here, only because the challenge ahead of that film were greater than the other two and in many ways the joys of the film are greater too. The other two are worthy nominees and winners I wouldn't complain about (I like The Descendants more than anyone else here, I think, and revisiting it on TV a couple times recently have only increased that). Hugo can get in based on a lack of alternatives, but that screenplay is so choppy that I can't really endorse it. I would replace The Ides of March with Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by dws1982 »

The Original BJ wrote:But I think there's a pretty significant structural problem in the script, mainly the fact that the movie ends right when I expected the third act to kick in. While many films today wear out their welcome by the conclusion, this was one that just seemed to stop when I wanted it to keep exploring the consequences of the characters' actions in an increasingly deeper way.
I don't really have that issue with the screenplay, although I did think when I first saw it that it would be interesting in seeing a follow-up to see where things went from there. My main issue with the screenplay is that a few of the monologues are pretty weak: The way Paul Bettany breaks down his income (and what he spends it on) almost to the penny always felt more like a screenwriter's clever device than anything. A scene where Stanley Tucci talks about a bridge he helped build during his engineering days is probably a worse offender--he has so many facts and figures at his disposal that it just doesn't ring true. But, on the other hand, Jeremy Irons has a very good monologue about how this crash isn't really any different from other market crashes, and Kevin Spacey's speech to the traders before the market opens is really good too. I think one of my favorite things about the screenplay is the way Chandor seemed aware of just how far to go with the "finance speak"; obviously the details behind a market crash like this, and an over-leveraged securities firm, etc., are all pretty intricate and confusing for people who don't work in finance. Chandor seemed aware of how far to go in order to make the film feel authentic without leaving most viewers feeling lost. I really like Margin Call, and it's one film that I surprisingly return to quite often.

My winner, like most everyone else's, is A Separation, one of the most well-structured, confident screenplays nominated by the Academy in quite some time. Farhadi develops the characters in a pretty vivid way, introduces various plot twists and devices without necessarily announcing them as such, and has a really good notion of the way in which small events that we don't necessarily notice can lead to bigger, life-changing events that can affect people we don't even know. It's a great screenplay.

On the Adapted side, Moneyball was a solid nominee, although the way the final fifteen minutes keep hammering home more and more validation for Billy Beane--as if the previous two hours hadn't done that in perfectly interesting fashion--keep it out of win consideration for me. Tinker Tailor is an easy pick for the winner. It does a great job paring down LeCarre's novel into a workable film, recontextualizing scenes, characters, and even playing around with the structure itself at some points. And for such a dense spy thriller, it's also surprisingly moving.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by Sabin »

Probably the easiest call of all the categories. The Best Film of 2011 is A Separation, and it is also one of the best written films in recent memory. This is especially complimentary because there's nothing in the screenplay's central conceit that is terribly original but the way it's constructed feels immediately timeless.

There's nothing in the other Original Screenplays that really comes close. I expect this to be one of the biggest washouts in our polls. I'm not sure you can really call the other screenplays good. If I remembered anything about Margin Call I might call it the best of the other nominated scripts but I don't. J.C. Chandor is a filmmaker who has so far gotten me excited about what his films are going to be about. Bridesmaids is a triumph of casting, improv, and gags. The fact that the third act where Kristen Wiig is needed to save the day due to nothing of her own doing is evidence of this. I'm not a huge fan of this film but I do like it, but honoring its writing seems weird. Midnight in Paris is one of the most charming Woody Allen movies recently but it's also one of the laziest. It doesn't do much with its premise but it's fleet enough on its feet to keep me entertained. The Artist isn't and its screenwriting is its central flaw and easiest its most undeserving nomination. If The Artist was nominated for Best Sound Mixing that might come close. if Midnight in Paris doesn't fully capitalize on its premise then The Artist doesn't start to. Obvious films that should have been considered include Beginners, Certified Copy, Margaret, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Win Win.

MY RANKING
1. NADIR AND SIMIN, A SEPARATION, Asghar Farhadi
And then as MASSIVE a gulf between the next batch of nominees as any category that's ever existed.
2. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, Woody Allen
3. THE ARTIST, Michel Hazanavicius
4. MARGIN CALL, J.C. Chandor
5. BRIDESMAIDS, Kristen Wiig & Annie Mumolo

The same thing for this category. Hugo's screenplay is the worst thing about it. The story eventually has nothing to do with the premise of the film. The Descendants was a baffling experience. I think Alexander Payne is just too much of a dick to succeed as a sentimentalist. Something bitter like Nebraska is more up his alley. However that's directing. I think you could lift this script wholesale and give it to a different filmmaker and make it work. Oscar-worthy? No. I would love to read Farragut North because as a work of a screenwriting the result feels slight. This isn't helped by the casting of Ryan Gosling and Evan Rachel Wood but while there's a lot I enjoyed in it the narrative itself struggled to recreation a stagebound experience on the big screen. I see that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is winning. I can't in good conscience vote for it because this film is so goddamn weird when I watch it. They're trying to condense so much into every frame of the film that I find it a disorienting experience. The more I watch the film the more I like it but unless a director's cut is released with more material it just doesn't work for me as much as I need it to.

Moneyball deserves to take this. It's a stronger film than The Social Network. I don't know who wrote what in the film but it's clear to me that The American President aside, Aaron Sorkin doesn't really write third acts but rather he writes towards punchline conclusions and Moneyball has one that's grown on me quite a bit. The dialogue is just excellent in a way that doesn't feel written and entire scenes jump out to me as little classics. I can't call Moneyball a great film but I increasingly love this film and watching it win in this category would have been nice.

MY RANKING
1. MONEYBALL, Aaron Sorkin, Steve Zaillian [screenplay], Stan Chervin [story]
2. THE DESCENDANTS, Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash
3. TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, Bridget O'Connor & Peter Staughan
4. THE IDES OF MARCH, George Clooney & Grant Henslov
5. HUGO, John Logan
Last edited by Sabin on Mon Mar 20, 2017 12:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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mlrg
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by mlrg »

voted for A Separation and Moneyball
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by ITALIANO »

I was disappointed by Woody Allen's (predictable) win. Midnight in Paris has a strong - but strong doesn't mean original - central idea, and develops it in the most obvious way, like a good high school student would (let's put Ernest Hemingway... who else was in Paris? oh, Gertrude Stein of course...). It's a very minor piece of screenwriting, one which wouldn't have been taken so seriously in Europe. And while many considered it "charming", even from this point of view one nominee, The Artist, was I think considerably more so.
But the winner should definitely be A Separation - which succeeds as human drama, as a portrayal of a unique society, and also as a sort-of thriller - not a small accomplishment. It's an intimate story, yet Farhadi makes it so universal that it can be shared, understood, "felt" even by those who live in different countries and different cultures. It's certainly one of the best screenplays in recent memory.

I was even more disappointed by that bland Alexander Payne movie winning the Adapted trophy. It's exactly the opposite of A Separation - uninvolving, uninteresting, without any kind of urgency, of tension, And it's not like there werent alternatives. Moneyball, for example, while no masterpiece is an example of efficient American screenplay. A professional job, let's say so. It makes even those completely ignorant of baseball - like me - intrigued by the story it tells, and the main character at least is rather subtly written.
But MY winner is Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - I especially liked that it didn't try to make an admittedly complicated story "simple", accessible. It's probably not "deep", but the (rare, today) pleasure of watching an "adult" thriller more than makes up for that.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by The Original BJ »

All of my favorite movies this year were on the original side, and a lot of them came nowhere near Oscar consideration. From a screenplay standpoint, I would rate Certified Copy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Margaret most deserving of inclusion in this race.

That said, you at least have to give the writers credit for picking a diverse field -- there's a pretty wide range of types of movies here, and even if I wouldn't endorse many of these as actual nominees, I salute the attempt to honor variety.

Bridesmaids at least passes the funny test, which is more than I would say for many of the movies I've seen from the produced-by-Apatow factory. I admit that I laughed quite a bit, in certain moments even rather uproariously, and I don't have a problem that there's a place in our moviegoing culture for that kind of pleasure. But the script is fairly wobbly stuff, especially once it gets into the second hour, and like many of our contemporary comedies, it goes on way too long for such a thin narrative. Not sure why this was thought of as an awards candidate, except for that the increasingly louder voices calling for Oscars for pop hits eventually had to make a breakthrough somewhere.

I think there's a lot of strong dialogue throughout Margin Call, and I found the movie surprisingly suspenseful, which I wouldn't have necessarily expected from such subject matter. But I think there's a pretty significant structural problem in the script, mainly the fact that the movie ends right when I expected the third act to kick in. While many films today wear out their welcome by the conclusion, this was one that just seemed to stop when I wanted it to keep exploring the consequences of the characters' actions in an increasingly deeper way.

The Artist is a charming movie, and I found it enjoyable enough, though minor. There are some very witty sequences, and from a script standpoint, the film finds entertaining ways to toy with the silent movie conceit. But the story should basically count as the umpteenth adaptation of A Star is Born, and you shouldn't win ORIGINAL Screenplay Oscars for repackaging the same old Hollywood success story tropes.

Midnight in Paris is one of two movies here that I feel thoroughly deserved their nominations, so I wasn't bothered by the fact that Woody won for this. The script takes a very clever concept and continues to push it in surprising and compelling directions as the film goes on (when the carriage pulled up to take Marion Cotillard back to HER favored nostalgic era, I let out a completely delighted laugh.) And thematically, it's a very touching statement on what it means to idolize past eras, for better or for worse. It's hard to root against an Oscar for a script with a witty set-up, interesting execution, and this kind of dramatic resonance.

But I think A Separation had by far the year's best screenplay. From a narrative standpoint, it's a master class in plotting, with at least two moments that caught me completely by surprise, and which propelled the film into entirely new directions both times. But it's also a script that's operating on so many levels beyond plot -- it's specific enough to Iranian culture/religion that the film can be read as a critique of that country's social customs and gender politics, but universal enough to resonate as a morally complex drama for a viewer of any nationality. I love it when films present a central conflict and don't take sides on who is 100% right or wrong -- this movie doesn't have easy answers, and it doesn't judge its characters. Plus, it's completely gripping from the opening frame to the last. It gets my vote in a walk.
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Re: Best Screenplay 2011

Post by Mister Tee »

An odd, anomalous year for these categories. In all other years since the best picture expansion, 8 or 9 of the best picture nominees also got noted by the writers' branch; here, a mere 5 turn up.

It was also a fairly weak year, and I guess I commend the writers for going off the beaten track, but not for all the selections they made.

On the original side, there are several un-cited scripts I'd have preferred to actual nominees: Lonergan's Margaret, first and foremost, but also Martha Marcy Mae Marlene, and even Win Win...McCarthy never seems to have much luck getting nominated.

I have to side with Magilla and say Bridesmaids wouldn't have qualified in my book. It's strange, with so many Apatow-ish comedies touted for Oscars nods (and even WGA-nominated), that this was the first to make it onto the Academy list. My cynical side thinks the desire to push girl-power overrode the branch's usual better taste.

Margin Call had an interesting start -- its ominous tone made it feel almost like a monster movie, with something horrible relentlessly approaching -- but I thought the latter portions didn't live up to the start (with the domestic scenes flirting with Playhouse 90 era dramaturgy).

I didn't think The Artist added up to all that much, and what did make it memorable was not its plotting nor (obviously) its dialogue but its visual style.

I understood the desire to honor Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris. Maybe you had to have been aboard for the whole Woody ride -- the early years where his funny stuff was brushed aside by Oscar voters, the salad days of Annie Hall through Bullets over Broadway, and then the sad decline, where one mediocre movie followed another. What was most depressing in that latter period, for those of us who'd been elated by his comedies in the 70s and 80s, was he was doing the same kind of jokes, only they were falling flat. It was like watching Willie Mays in the last years, when he couldn't catch up to the fastball anymore: what he was doing now seemed to diminish what he had done in his heyday. Many of us had lost hope he could ever recapture the knack. So, while Midnight in Paris was slight compared to Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanors, it was such a joy to be able to laugh with Woody as we once had that the whole movie felt like a gift.

However...he doesn't get my vote, here, because A Separation is simply a better, larger, more complex effort, and it wins the prize going away.

Over in Adaptation land, there weren't any films egregiously omitted, but the Dragon Tattoo movie certainly deserved the slot more than The Ides of March -- a thoroughly mediocre script that owed more to its actors and director than they did to it.

The Descendants is, for me, Alexander Payne's least effective film. I like moments in it, but the comedy feels strained much of the way, and the blend with drama isn't what you'd call smooth. I'm surprised the film did as well as it did with critics and with Oscar voters.

I really like Hugo, but, like The Artist, its achievements are in the visual filmmaking realm. The script, in fact, doesn't really add up, failing to make a workable connection between Hugo's situation and the whole Melies world.

I rate Moneyball the strong runner-up here: a very witty, engaging film about a subject that wouldn't seem to have all that much audience engagement. It's not a world-beater -- just a pleasing little thing -- but in terms of funny/insightful, I think it stands well above The Descendants.

My winner, though (and I don't seem to be alone), is Tinker Tailor Solider Spy -- a beautifully distilled piece of thriller writing. It takes a very complex story and moves it along at a brisk pace, presuming the audience will be able to jump aboard and stay on track. This enables it to cover alot more ground than the standard thriller, while still giving us plenty to ruminate on. After Tree of Life, Tinker Tailor is my favorite film of this woebegone year, and it gets my vote here with ease.
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Best Screenplay 2011

Post by Big Magilla »

For Best Original Screenplay, the first to go for me is the stupidly unfunny Bridesmaids which really had no place being anywhere near the Oscars.

I found Midnight in Paris to be a mixed bag with some lovely moments in the past but rather heavy going in the present.

I found Margin Call quite engrossing while watching it but can't recall much about it now.

It comes down to the two "foreign" made films - the inventive Best Picture winner, The Artist and the complex, absorbing Foreign Film winner, A Separation which was to be the year's best film. A Separation gets my vote.

For Adapted Screenplay, I thought The Descendants had some clever dialogue, but I found the overall film disappointing.

The popularity of Moneyball I didn't get at all and I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time it took place and followed the Oakland A's rather closely then.

I liked Hugo for its inventiveness but felt the screenplay, like the film itself, could have been trimmed.

The Ides of March, like Margin Call, I enjoyed while watching it but can't remember much about it now.

Thankfully there was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a complex rendering of an even more complex novel which was even more marvelously adapted than the near-perfect 1979 mini-series. It easily gets my vote here.
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