Best Original Screenplay, 1999
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Nominee Alan Ball American Beauty 2:1 |
Ball has picked up citations from the Writers Guild and the Hollywood Foreign Press, and he is responsible for this year's seeming Oscar juggernaut. Screenplay has been selling well commercially, which suggests an unusually high degree of popularity, recollective of support for past winners like The Piano and Pulp Fiction. |
American Beauty feels destined to clean up in a lot of other categories, and Oscar voters sometimes pull a perverse trick of abandoning the writers of the films they reward everywhere else. Remember when The English Patient won nine Oscars but no Screenplay award? That twist in The Sixth Sense may be impossible to ignore. |
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Charlie Kaufman Being John Malkovich 5:1 |
The category is, after all, titled "Original Screenplay," and nothing seen on screen this year was more original than Kaufman's pop-comic psychological fantasia. Several other Kaufman scripts have since been bought and moved into production, suggesting a mini-star being born before our eyes. |
Low nomination turnout means that too many voters still write off Malkovich as excessively weird. By the same token, if indeed Kaufman stays around for a while in Hollywood, he may have other chances to win. |
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Paul Thomas Anderson Magnolia 10:1 |
Yet another sprawling and deliriously thrilling L.A.-epic from the Boogie Nights auteur. Anderson has actors behind him in a big way, unless they're mad that he barely hired any new people for his third film. Wrote some scenes for Tom Cruise and Julianne Moore in particular destined to be remembered in screenwriting How-To manuals. |
Magnolia has proven to have an even more rarefied niche appeal than Being John Malkovich, and some people question whether Anderson is actually inventive or just good at recycling old tricks. And you know Those Things That Fell From The Sky? People don't get that. |
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M. Night Shyamalan The Sixth Sense 2:1 |
The twist. Look, it worked for The Crying Game and The Usual Suspects, and as in the case of Neil Jordan's gender-politics thriller, The Sixth Sense is in danger of being shut out if not rewarded here. Just as 1992's Unforgiven sweep failed to encompass its Screenplay, voters may want to vary up the results and toss the Indian wunderkind a trophy. |
Older voters may be turned off by the picture, especially if they dismiss it as horror fare. Shyamalan himself appears to have run into some ego-related PR problems in Hollywood, though Quentin Tarantino's win in 1994 proves that ego and Oscar can coincide. |
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Mike Leigh Topsy-Turvy 10:1 |
Leigh's script has the most literary language of the bunch, and period films traditionally do well in the writing categories. |
Little buzz, small audiences, and a general perception that Leigh cedes too much of the writing responsibilities to his cast. |