Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Four Oscar questions

When is an original screenplay not an original screenplay?
Todd Haynes's screenplay for Far From Heaven is nominated for best original screenplay. Except that the film is a uncreditted remake of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows. At times, it's a shot-for-shot remake. (Rent the DVD if you doubt me.) They've added the gay subplot and made the gardener black instead of Rock Hudson, but it's the same damned story. In fact, it means that All That Heaven Allows has been remade twice without crediting the original, since Rainer Werner Fassbinder remade the film in a working-class German setting as Ali: Fear Eats The Soul.

When is an original screenplay not an original screenplay redux?
Jay Cocks, Kenneth Lonergan and Steve Zaillian laboured mightily over a 25-year period to come up with the screenplay for Gangs Of New York "based on the book by Herbert Asbery" which is nominated as an original screenplay. Well, OK, the film's story isn't in the book – the film's lifted mostly details of life in the Five Points. I'm still trying to figure out how it took three good writers – Cocks wrote The Age Of Innocence, Lonergan wrote You Can Count On Me and Zaillian has an Oscar for Schindler's List – to come up with "They killed his father. And now he's back. For revenge!"

Can a fictional person win an Oscar?
Leaving aside for the moment the various blacklisted writers who won Oscars in the 1950s under pseudonyms and the names of fronts, what do we do about Donald Kaufman? When Roderick Jaynes was nominated for editing Fargo, it raised the question of who would accept, because Jaynes is a pseudonym for the Coen Brothers, who decided that "written, directed and produced by" were enough credits to have the name Coen under. "Donald Kaufman," who shares the screenplay nomination for Adaptation with Charlie Kaufman, does not exist except in a fictional sense. The conceit of Adaptation is that we're watching the movie written by the two screenwriting brothers in the film – Donald's contributes the much maligned climax of the film, composed after Charlie asks him to take a look at the script in progress. It's not quite as confusing as it sounds. But it could lead to an intriguing acceptance speech.

What do we do about Andy Serkis?
Who? The English actor who plays Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers. But Gollum is computer-generated. Or is he? Programmers didn't create Gollum out of nothing. Andy Serkis voices the character and, in essence, created the physical reality of the character so the programmers would have something to work from. He gave the performance, and it's remarkable. He's just not physically there anymore, at least until the Special Edition DVD, which will have lots of footage, I'm sure, of Serkis's work in front of the green screen. One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that the actors branch of the Academy is not ready to honour someone who's physical work was drawn over, any more than they were willing to nominate Robin Williams for his voice work on Aladdin.