Can ‘American Fiction’ overcome stiff competition to win Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars?

Jeffrey Kare
·4 min read
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As of this writing our combined predictions for this year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar consists of the following films in order of their racetrack odds: “Killers of the Flower Moon” (39/10 odds), “Oppenheimer” (4/1 odds), “Poor Things” (9/2 odds), “American Fiction” (11/2 odds) and “The Zone of Interest” (17/2 odds). However, despite “American Fiction” currently ranking fourth, I’d like to dig into its possible path to win this particular race.

Adapted from Percival Everett‘s 2001 novel “Erasure,” “American Fiction” follows Monk (Jeffrey Wright), a frustrated novelist who’s tired of the offensive tropes in Black entertainment. To prove his point, he writes his own outlandish book that propels him into the heart of hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain. On paper, the current top three for Best Adapted Screenplay have a lot going for them, but they also have some disadvantages that could benefit “American Fiction.”

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“Killers of the Flower Moon” was a passion project for legendary director Martin Scorsese. He adapted David Grann‘s nonfiction book of the same name, sharing credit on the screenplay with previous Oscar winner Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”). Some may feel that Scorsese is overdue for a second win, and voters could give it to him here as a way to acknowledge his overall contributions to “Flower Moon.” But the Academy has mostly been soft on his films ever since he won Best Director for “The Departed” in 2006 — “Hugo” won five craft Oscars, but no other Scorsese film since “Departed” has taken home any trophies — so a loss here wouldn’t be that surprising.

With “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan adapted Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin‘s 721-page biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer titled “American Prometheus” into a three-hour epic. As Nolan is currently ahead to win Best Director for “Oppenheimer,” academy members may not feel the need to give him this award too. That said, that didn’t stop Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (“Birdman”), Bong Joon-ho (“Parasite”) or Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once“) from sweeping when they had multiple noms in their respective years. So it’s not impossible “Oppenheimer” could prevail here too if it cleans up in other top categories on Oscar night.

SEEOscar Experts Typing: Could ‘The Holdovers’ or ‘American Fiction’ take down the Best Picture top dogs?

Meanwhile, director Yorgos Lanthimos‘s “Poor Things,” which was adapted from Alasdair Gray‘s novel of the same name, could have a similar problem to the one Lanthimos’s “The Favourite” faced when it contended for Best Original Screenplay in 2018: Tony McNamara is credited with the script, not Lanthimos. As we’ve seen in recent years, if the director has also written the script, academy members tend to put their votes there: seven out of the last eight Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars were won by the films’ directors. The only exception was “Call Me By Your Name” (written by James Ivory; directed by Luca Guadagnino) in 2017, which was helped by the fact that it was the only Best Picture nominee in contention that year.

As for “American Fiction,” several films about writers (whether they’re novelists, journalists or screenwriters) have done well in screenplay categories before. Just look at “Sunset Boulevard,” “All the President’s Men,” “Julia,” “Almost Famous,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Spotlight.” Not to mention that writer/director Cord Jefferson is already on the industry’s radar as an Emmy and WGA winner for the HBO limited series “Watchmen.” Many voters for the Writers Guild of America Awards are TV scribes, which could make him a threat to win there since he has a background in writing for television, and that could give him the momentum he needs to repeat at the Oscars.

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