And The Oscar Goes To…!

The nominations for this March’s Academy Awards came out last week. I realize that many of you prefer books to films, but I appreciate both. And especially if the film has a literary precedent. I’ve just read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and am looking forward to watching the highly acclaimed film. Last night we watched Sinners, a genre-busting movie that has been nominated for a record-breaking sixteen Oscars, including for the writing of the original screenplay. Another contender is One Battle After Another, which is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. It’s not hard to see that it’s all about the writing. Without a great story, you can forget it.

For its value as pure, unadulterated entertainment, Bridgerton, a Netflix production, rates highly with me. It’s based on a series of romance novels by Julia Quinn and has won its share of Emmy Awards. Again, it’s about story. It revolves around the Bridgertons, a family very high on the social ladder in early 19th-century London. Think Jane Austen era. The real novelty of this costume drama is that society is racially integrated. There are not only White, but also Black and Asian lords and ladies. Even the Queen of England is nominally black. The Dowager Lady Bridgerton has four sons and four daughters for whom she dearly desires marital love matches. Will she succeed? The series continues to delight.

What about these stories makes them appealing? I think it is because each of them, in their own distinct way, shines a light on the universality of the human condition.

In One Battle After Another, the book and the movie are quite different. The book was a monumental novel that the director Paul Thomas Anderson had often said would be impossible to film. Thus, when he attempted it, he had to reduce it to its essence, choosing the most succulent plot strands: a man trying to save his daughter. To quote Time Magazine, “There is…an unmissable link between book and film: empathy, for anybody robbed of agency or power, even though they may stumble as they try to make the world a better place.”

Sinners does not try to make the world a better place. Twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both played brilliantly by Michael B. Jordan, return to their home in the Mississippi Delta with lots of cash in their pockets from “working” with the mob in Chicago. The year is 1932. They want to open a juke joint and start throwing their money around to do so. This unexpectedly becomes a story of family and vampires. Weird. However, family is the unifying element.

Hamnet takes us back to the late 1500s, and this is about family and the grief suffered when a son dies. Agnes, the son’s mother, doesn’t understand how her husband can simply return to London to write and produce his plays. That is, until she goes to London and sees his play called Hamlet. She realizes then that Will grieves differently from her.

Many more movies are up for Oscars than I can highlight here. Many more series on the streaming services are similarly about family and humans as political beings. Scratch the surface, and you’ll find they are all about the human condition. Is this something to remember when writing your own stories?

featured image compliments of Wikimedia Commons