Academy Awards Ceremony

At the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929, the writing awards were already split into two categories dress hat Writing, Original Story and Best Writing, Adaptation. (For the record, that first year saw the only presentation of an Oscar for Best Title Writing, an art that had become obsolete by the quest year.)Over the next few decades, the delineation of the screenplay awards morphed a bit.For a while, three awards were presented Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Story, and Best Story and Screenplay- confusing categorizations that intercommunicate to the tortured distinctions made by the Writers Guild when determining authorship. But for the last half century, the sensible division between an original screenplay and a screenplay based on a pre quick work has held.Writers and their auditory modalitys see a difference between the art of creating characters, situations and dialogue out of whole cloth and the art of turning an existing work into a pic script with all t he requisite transformations that such a translation entails.This is not to say that the distinction between an original and qualified work is always clear. In 2000, Joel and Ethan Coen s O Brother, Where Art Thou? was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay thanks to a credit on the film that cheekily stated it was based on Homers Odyssey.Eyebrows rose all over Hollywood O Brother had about as much to do with the Odyssey as did The Wizard of Oz or really any story about someone lost who wants to go home.The Coens were perhaps prompt- ing the age-old debate as to whether any artwork, curiously a narratively driven artwork, is ever truly original. In a broad sense, every storyteller obviously builds on the stories that came before him or her and relies on pre-programmed audience expectations.Harold Blooms Anxiety of Influence addresses this topic with great insight, and an entire academic discipline, the study of Intertextuality, analyzes this phenomenon.The Oscar nominees for Best O riginal Screenplay this year American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, and Nebraska all utilise existing genre tropes, standard (or subverted) plot devices, patterns of dialogue derived from previous works, and so forth. Blue Jasmine is quite consciously based on Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, with nearly every character and situation a direct outgrowth of the earlier work.The dialogue is new, but its debatable as to whether the work is Original in the strictest sense. for certain it is much more of an adaptation than O Brother, Where Art Thou? Conversely, one of the nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay this year is