Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Original is a no-brainer: Sunday Bloody Sunday.

The Adapted category is wonderful. Among the best line-ups ever. Even The French Connection is deserving by itself to me, though admittedly not with this amazing competition.

The Last Picture Show shows ordinary people's dryness, tediousness and illusions as few movies do.
The Conformist is a fascinating, multi-layered insight. Alberto Moravia's masterful novel is cleverly developed with ashtonishing visual compositions and a new way of understanding its ending. Jean Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda deserved the Oscar. And her face's beauty is even better enhanced in that sad Finzi Contini garden, along with angels' herald Helmut Berger. The feeling of nostalgia and unrequited love is beautifully displayed.
And A Clockwork Orange is my personal Bronze Kubrick. It's nearly impossible to imagine what needs to be improved in that script.

It's a difficult choice, but my final vote goes to Bernardo Bertolucci's unforgettable accomplishment.

Though some of those omissions are rather disappointing, it's hugely understandable because most of those movies the Academy would never think to nominate. Especially McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Bananas and The Devils.

Harold and Maude, Taking Off and Carnal Knowledge would all be more preferable than The Hospital in Original, but Sunday Bloody Sunday is the class act here and gets my unqualified vote.

A Clockwork Orange is my favorite film overall but the screenplay for The Last Picture Show gets my vote in Adapted over The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The Conformist and Clockwork, any one of which would be a worthy winner.

My votes go to the mature and sensitive love triangle of Sunday Bloody Sunday and the frightening, disturbing and dark dystopian nightmare of A Clockwork Orange. My big omissions would be Carnal Knowledge, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Death in Venice, Macbeth, Harold and Maude, Bananas, and A New Leaf. None of these were robbed and the actual nominees were a good slate, so these weren't huge omissions. But, I wished some of them could've made it. I have not seen The Devils due to my age, so I wouldn't know if that was a major omission or not, but I'll probably watch it some day.

Good to great line-up all round, but then 1971 is probably my favourite year of filmmaking.

Adapted: The Last Picture just ahead of A Clockwork Orange (that I don't like the book but love the film is a testimony to Kubrick). And then there are those two great Italian films, either one a very worthy winner.

Original: Sunday Bloody Sunday leads to pack with the only other major stand, another Italian film.

Omissions are plentiful and understandable in this banner year: The Devils, The Music Lovers, Walkabout, Clare's Knee, Death in Venice (another example of a better film adaptation than the book), Deep End, The Boy Friend, Play Misty For Me, Loot, MacBeth, Harold and Maude and dare I say The Seven Minutes.

What was the best screenplay of 1971?