Moving right along. If you previously missed our analysis of the supporting actor races, the big techies, or the odds and ends, click the links I just fastidiously embedded.
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
NOMINEES
Blue Moon—Robert Kaplow
It Was Just an Accident—Jafar Panahi et al.
Marty Supreme—Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie
Sentimental Value—Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
Sinners—Ryan Coogler
WILL WIN
Sinners. It may have 16 nominations, but in most cases it’s facing off against One Battle After Another. (The four below-the-line fields where that isn’t the case—costume design, makeup and hairstyling, original song, and visual effects—all have their own favorites.) That will cause voters consternation in most cases. Not so here.
SHOULD WIN
Strong group here: the snappy dialogue of Blue Moon, the fraught dilemmas (and wry satire) of It Was Just an Accident, the bristling genre mix of Sinners. But I’m taking Sentimental Value, an ambitious picture whose scope feels sprawling and intimate in equal measure.
MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
It Was Just an Accident—Jafar Panahi et al.
Sentimental Value—Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
Sorry, Baby—Eva Victor
Twinless—James Sweeney
Universal Language—Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin
Sorry, Baby carries a haunting texture that belies its engaging structure. Twinless snakes in unexpected directions while also delivering some choice dialogue. Universal Language needs to be seen to be believed.
MovieManifesto’s winner: Sentimental Value—Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier.
Honorable mention: Americana—Tony Tost; Companion—Drew Hancock; Left-Handed Girl—Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou; Weapons—Zach Cregger.
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
NOMINEES
Bugonia—Will Tracy
Frankenstein—Guillermo del Toro
Hamnet—Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell
One Battle After Another—Paul Thomas Anderson
Train Dreams—Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar
WILL WIN
The same logic for Original Screenplay applies here as well, only flipped. Sinners is absent, so One Battle After Another takes this in a walkover.
SHOULD WIN
And rightly so.
MOVIEMANIFESTO’S BALLOT
No Other Choice—Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, and Jahye Lee
On Swift Horses—Bryce Kass
One Battle After Another—Paul Thomas Anderson
100 Nights of Hero—Julia Jackman
Wake Up Dead Man—Rian Johnson
Being generally illiterate, I’m generally unfamiliar with source material, so I’m forced to evaluate these screenplays on their own merits rather than on the skillfulness of their adaptation (which is kind of the point). So be it. No Other Choice is devilishly twisty and thematically angry. On Swift Horses packs a mighty wallop for reasons beyond Daisy Edgar-Jones’ face. One Battle After Another is endlessly provocative and also very funny. 100 Nights of Hero feels like it births a new form of classic fairytale. Wake Up Dead Man finds Rian Johnson continuing to defy the odds and bring suspense to a wrung-out subgenre.
MovieManifesto’s winner: One Battle After Another—Paul Thomas Anderson.
Coming tomorrow: Best Actress and Best Actor.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.