We are 9 days away from my favorite night of the year: Oscar Sunday! I love the Oscars – the hype, the drama, the dresses. While I see fewer movies than I used to, I do try to get to as many of the nominees as I can. My favorite categories are always the screenplay categories, because (surprise, surprise) I treasure good writing in a movie. I am especially interested in screenplays that are adapted from books, as I enjoy scrutinizing how the adaptation differs from the original and why the changes were made.
Apparently, I am not alone – I have written a number of posts comparing books to the movies they were adapted for, and those posts seem to generate the most traffic from search engines.
Here are some of my book vs movie posts:
My favorite local bookstore, Politics & Prose, has a page on its website dedicated to books that were made into Oscar movies. Scroll to the bottom to see this year’s crop of book-to-movies. I haven’t read any of the books this year, and sadly have seen very few of the ten movies nominated in the two categories. However, here are my predictions: Best Original Screenplay – The Hurt Locker, because I think people want to recognize this movie; and Best Adapted Screenplay – Up In The Air.