Best Original Screenplay

HERE is the fierce competition for a screenplay nomination! There is literally only one guaranteed nomination, for the only Best Picture candidate in this contest, Milk. Then the race splinters. There are five guys the Academy loves to nominate: Charlie Kaufman, Mike Leigh, last year’s champs the Coen brothers, and the most nominated writer in Academy history, Woody Allen. There are the indie darlings, which always fare better in the screenplay awards than with Director and Picture: Frozen River, Rachel Getting Married, The Visitor, The Wrestler. Finally there is the nearly-annual animated flick with solid gold reviews, a foregone conclusion for Best Animated Feature, that is somehow always reserved the last seat at the table. This’ll be a doozy! First I’ll cross off Synedoche and Frozen River since they didn’t break out of the ISA “ghetto.” Next I’ll eliminate the Coens, because Oscar has honored them for their comparatively-highbrow offerings – the crime/morality tales Fargo and No Country For Old Men, and their Odyssey adaptation O Brother Where Art Thou? – but not for any of their all-out Bizarro-fests. (Burn is definitely the latter.) Argh, I have to eliminate two more? From the frequent-nominee category, I’ll scratch off Happy Go Lucky and predict Vicky Cristina Barcelona, because Woody got the WGA nod and Mike Leigh didn’t. In the Independent Spirit corner, I’ll give the tiniest demerit to the low-key Visitor and choose The Wrestler, a WGA nominee with a classic comeback story line that earned raves for never feeling clichéd, and Rachel Getting Married, for building strong momentum early in the season, and for its Academy pedigree: First-time writer Jenny Lumet is the daughter of four-time directing nominee Sidney Lumet. (Oscar does love a good dynasty.) Lastly, Finding Nemo creator Andrew Stanton will pick up his second writing nod for the universally-lauded Wall-E. Yet there are STILL dark-horse possibilities in Gran Torino, the Foreign-Language frontrunner Waltz With Bashir, In Bruges, even Tropic Thunder…