The Only Oscar I Cared About

In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't watch one second of last night's Oscar telecast. Like every other awards ceremony, I preferred to simply read the recap. In this day and age if anything newsworthy happened it would have been on the Internet within the hour and I don't care what people were wearing, so reading the post-mortem this morning I got all the facts while still saving hours of my life. (We'll have forgotten who won by June anyway.) Besides, this year seemed to be one of the least-suspenseful programs in a few years. Other than Best Picture, which was still just a two-horse race, all the major acting awards appeared to be predetermined. The only thing left was to see how bad these actors are at improvisation as they tried to convince us they never thought they could possibly win this award, even though they have been cleaning up at award shows for the better part of two months.

However, there was one Oscar where I was truly interested in the outcome - Best Adapted Screenplay. And I was extremely pleased to see Aaron Sorkin win for "The Social Network". I had feared that, given the way it had been piling up trophies throughout award season, people would have gotten sick of it winning time after time and given the Oscar to someone else, just for a little variety. But, thankfully, that wasn't the case. I know that some people look down on the Adapted Screenplay category, thinking of it only as glorified editing. "The story is already written, all you have to do is add stage directions," they say. Those people are stupid. (Do you like how I both created and dismissed characters in two sentences?) There is a lot more that goes into it than that, but that is not why I wanted Sorkin to win. I admire writing that A. makes me care about something I normally wouldn't and B. is produced under pressure.

Here's the thing about this movie: I hate Facebook and I still loved it. I don't have a Facebook page and loathe the people who look at me like I have three heads when I tell them I don't. But, the writing for this was so amazing I was willing to overlook all that. Whether you like it or not, that website is changing the world and this script managed to capture that fact. But the main reason I thought it was the best screenplay of the year is because I think people sometimes forget just how hard it is to write about something that is world-altering while it is still going on. It is easy to write a meaningful and thought-provoking piece about a subject when you have the perspective that comes with the passage of time. But to capture the importance of an event as it is happening and turn it into a good, well-written story is damned impressive.

When studios try to rush a script into production to capitalise on something in the news, it is like trying to catch a wave before it crashes; it's a delicate balancing act. Move too quickly and the script is going to be bad. (See: Almost every Lifetime television movie ever made). But wait too long and it doesn't matter how well-written the script is, people will have moved to the next news cycle. (See: "Fair Game". It was a good story, but by the time it came out Bush II was out of office. At that point the way this country works it may as well have been about Lincoln.) If you can do it, you would rather be ahead of the wave than after it. Think about it like this: what made the movie "Rounders" so great was that it was a good, carefully-crafted movie that just happened to be about Texas Hold 'em. Therefore, when the Texas Hold 'em craze hit a couple years later the movie had a second life because it was a good movie and not just because of its subject matter. On the other hand, all the movies that were rushed into production at the time specifically to cash in on the Texas Hold 'em craze were God-awful because they were hastily-written. Big difference.

With the screenplay for "The Social Network" Sorkin managed to do both. He put out a great script and did it in a timely fashion. All writing projects have some kind of deadline, be they self or client-imposed, but I imagine that writing this particular screenplay was like having a giant clock hanging over his head. If he took too long then Facebook could be just another footnote in history. (How many MySpace movie scripts do you think have been scrapped in the past two years? Something tells me the people adapting "Winter's Bone" didn't have that kind of pressure on them.) So, it needed to be done quickly but it also couldn't suck. And, oh yeah, it's not an action movie so there was going to be more dialog than 90% of the screenplays out there. Again, a lot to do and not a ton of time to do it in. Deadline writing can really only go one of two ways: either you carve a masterpiece under the pressure or it's eh (and eh = complete shit to most writers). If you saw "The Social Network" (and if anyone asks, I totally saw it in a theatre) then you know which way Sorkin went. I'm just glad the Oscar people agreed with me.