Welcome back, Paul Thomas Anderson. Though Licorice Pizza marks his fifth nomination for writing, he has not appeared in this category since last millennium, for 1997’s Boogie Nights and 1999’s Magnolia. (There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice were adaptations.) Another return nominee is Adam McKay (for Don’t Look Up), last cited for 2019’s Vice. Belfast ushered the prolific multi-hyphenate Kenneth Branagh into this category for the first time. Setting a record of their own are Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, whose The Worst Person in the World is the first Norwegian original screenplay to be recognized by the Academy. And how’s this for an auspicious debut? King Richard is Zach Baylin’s first produced script.
BELFAST, Kenneth Branagh
Branagh was in COVID lockdown when he started writing the script for Belfast, the coming-of-age tale based on his memories of living through the Troubles as a child in 1969. “I remembered how my life changed when I heard the sound of what I thought were bumblebees,” Branagh said. “They weren’t, they were rioting mobs. In 20 seconds, the direction my life would take changed completely. And I decided I would go back to that incident and work out what a 9-year-old might think about that.”
DON’T LOOK UP, Adam McKay and David Sirota
A casual conversation about climate change was the spark that ignited Adam McKay and David Sirota’s satire about the destruction of the planet. Sirota, a friend of McKay’s, came up with the idea of a comet hurtling towards Earth that everyone ignores, and McKay wrote a lacerating dark comedy that indicts the media, government, big business and pretty much all of us who live on Earth for enabling a toxic culture of untruths.
KING RICHARD, Zach Baylin
From the moment Zach Baylin heard that Tim and Trevor White were producing a film about Venus and Serena Williams, he knew he had to write the script. He was a tennis fan well acquainted with Richard Williams’ improbable quest to turn his daughters into Grand Slam champions, so he pitched himself hard—“and two days later, he sent us an email that was the movie,” Tim White recalled. From months of research and hours of interviews with the Williams family came an uplifting, classically American story about the creation of champions from underdogs. As Tim said, “The only way to get this off the ground would be to have a script that was absolutely undeniable.”
LICORICE PIZZA, Paul Thomas Anderson
Licorice Pizza finds Paul Thomas Anderson back in the San Fernando Valley of Boogie Nights, this time following the adventures of a child star who, at 15, has grown out of the cute phase. Set in 1973, the shaggy-dog story is based on producer Gary Goetzman, a friend of Anderson’s who was once a kid actor. The filmmaker’s natural dialogue, nostalgic sensibility and loose pacing came together in what Alonso Duralde called a “lovely screenplay” that “breaks all the rules about beats and plotting.”
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt
The idea was to write a romantic comedy with a Norwegian sensibility: a funny movie with room for drama that explores some of life’s big questions (namely, identity). What Joachim Trier and his longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt came up with is a jaunty screenplay that chronicles, in 12 tidy chapters, the soul-searching of a millennial woman named Julie. “In life, you don’t have absolute control over your identity,” said Renate Reinsve, who plays Julie. “So I think it’s more true to be confused.”
Steve’s Perspective
While a King Richard surge isn’t out of the question, this category appears to be a showdown between stories set in the areas where their two writer- directors grew up: Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. PTA’s film has more critical cachet, which sometimes matters in the writing categories—but if Belfast is a true Best Picture contender, it needs to win in at least one other category, and this is its likeliest shot.
