Oscars 2022 – A Postscript

As we’re talking about scripts… or should be, right?

Hard to ignore the slap “heard round the world” though, isn’t it? A sad, unfair, unnecessary, shocking and pathetic moment.

But I’m going to stick with the art—and applaud the great writing this year in the form of the two winners.

Just as a reminder, take a look at the trailers for Coda and Belfast, below.

Here’s the trailer for Coda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pmfrE1YL4I

Here’s the trailer for Belfast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja3PPOnJQ2k

I hope you get a chance to see both of these films if you haven’t already, because they’re gems and both highly deserving of their writing accolades.

You may recall that I picked Belfast to win best original screenplay and CODA to win best adapted screenplay. My friends were all shocked that I predicted the winners—I’m rarely right about who comes out on top. Rarely.

So why was I right this year? Were the other films so lame? Don’t think so—and many of the other films had their champions and had won other awards.

No, I think this was a year for us to sit back and watch meaningful films about a family’s struggles—whether that struggle was about a family caught up in the troubles in Belfast or about a family caught up in the struggles between the speaking world and the signing world.

In Belfast we were given characters who felt differently about leaving their home in order to get away from the fighting. Put yourself in their place—could you do it? Could you leave everything you know behind, including some relatives, and go to a new place in the ‘hope’ that things will be better?

And in CODA we were given a deaf family with one hearing daughter—who helped them in their fishing business when speaking was required. She discovered a love for singing and wanted to go to school and study that, but could she do that and desert her family’s business? Could they survive without her?

Both of these films presented honest dilemmas for their characters and didn’t sugarcoat anything. They strove to tell the truth as these characters lived it.

And, for me, that’s the test—how true to life are your characters and the decisions you have them make. I’m not saying their decisions need to be ordinary to be true to life, but they need to be real—not just something that you, as a writer, concocted to make the story work. The story needs to work because the characters make it work through what they do and say.

Organic. That’s the word—it all needs to be organic, not forced. You never want the person reading your screenplay to say, “She’d never do that” or “That would never happen.” You want them to be so into your story as they read it that they don’t do anything except keep turning those pages—because that’s how involved in your story they are.

So write the next Academy Award winner. I know, I know—huge longshot. But why not try? Aiming high is what creating is all about, isn’t it?

Copyright © Diane Lake

03Apr22

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com