Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

It Happened One Night was the brightest, wittiest screenplay of the year and deserverdly won its Oscar.

The Thin Man had good lines, but wasn't as consistent. It was an admirable runner-up.

Viva Villa! must have impressed them with its volume. If they wanted to go for adventure, Dudley Nichols' screenplay for The Lost Patrol might have been a better choice.

Personally, I'd replace Viva Villa! with The Barretts of Wimpole Street and thrown in Death Takes a Holiday and The Count of Monte Cristo to round up to five.

Ben Hecht was obviously a writer of note, and given most of the frivolity on display in the Best Picture lineup, it's understandable why Viva Villa was one of the top-category nominees to place here: it at least feels like it's about something (and someone) important. Still, it's not a terribly exciting piece of biopic writing, and pales in comparison to the other two nominees.

The Thin Man succeeds on a lot of different levels -- the dialogue is witty and smart throughout, the portrait of a marriage is quite sweet, and on a sheer plot level, the mystery thread is well-structured and full of surprises. A lot of mysteries that skew toward the comic tend to feel like throwaways in the narrative department, so this last point is no minor achievement. It would be a perfectly worthy choice.

But I think It Happened One Night is one of the most perfect romantic comedies ever, a movie that achieves such a wonderful alchemy of elements that it feels almost as if it happened by magic. Of course, it didn't -- it had a great script to start with, full of funny romantic banter, classic scenes (the hitchhiking bit, the Walls of Jericho sequence), and an elegant structure that's well thought out without ever making the characters feel like chess pieces forced into a plot. I endorse its Oscar win.

Welcome back, Picking up where we left off on 11/18/2016.

There was no award for Best Screenplay of 1934 per se, as the award was then called Best Adaptation, but I'll post it under this name in order to make it easier to find.