Ok I know I said I'd be done with Oscar stuff for a long while, but I was thinking about this the other day, and I feel like writing a little bit before I watch 'About a Boy' and go to sleep.

For the 2006 Oscars, the original screenplay catagory, the nominees were:
Crash (winner)
Good Night, and Good Luck.
Match Point
Squid and the Whale, the
Syriana

I recall saying last year (while the race was on) that Crash winning O-Screenplay was a 'gimme.' In hindsight, I would rank these movies as follows:
Match Point
Squid and the Whale, the
Crash
Syriana
Good Night, and Good Luck.

First off, we can knock out Syriana because Stephen Gaghan won in 2001 (for a very well-deserved Traffic), and while that wasn't too recently, it's recent enough for a movie that revolves around a lot of similar themes to win. Plus, I didn't think Syriana was that hot. We can also kick GN&GL because, while that was a great movie, its screenplay wasn't one of its strongest points.

Why did Crash win? Because it was a movie that 'said something' about racism, and it had decent (and undeserved, but let's not go there) Best Picture potential. No doubt Crash was a well-crafted movie, but its writing was simply a string of two-dimensional characters (with the exception of maybe one) threaded together in a way I've seen in plenty of my undergraduate fiction classes. It didn't take any risks, and the fact that is jumped around so much allowed it to avoid any legitimate character depth. However, I will give it the 'grammatically (editorially?) correct' award to it, in the sense that there are no glaring flaws in the screenplay's consistency.

The Squid and the Whale was a fantastic little picture by Noah Baumbach that dealt with divorce and maturity and dealing with puberty. I think I'm a little biased since I'm an English major and there's lots of literature jokes throughout the movie. While a few portions of the movie were not as developed as the rest (I watched it like a year ago, so forgive my lack of examples), at least all the characters had their own struggles, both internal and external. Dealing with a small group of people, and developing them well, is always a much harder task than having a cast of sixty people and hoping they make up for each others' inadequacies. Which leads me to my next point:

Woody Allen should have won his fourth Oscar. I will admit it... I am a Woody Allen fan. And I know he really doesn't care about the Oscars. He didn't even know he won for Annie Hall until he read it in the paper the next morning. But he hasn't won in nearly 20 years, so surely he can win again soon. Anyway--Match Point is a drastic turn for Allen, leaving his faithful New York. This also proves he's a multi-talented filmmaker who can do both drama and comedy, and do them well. I'm going to be overly vague because this is not a movie to spoil. The story shows how everyone has deep flaws and desires they don't want anyone to find out, and how far people will go to get what they want. There are so many lines of quick wit, as well as genius turns in the plot that are impossible to guess, no matter how hard you try, or how 'good' you think you are. And Allen, of course, gets away with all of it, making every character completely believable in this struggle amongst the British upper class, where people sometimes assume life is just too easy. Again, with the small cast of characters, the audience gets a strange sense of familiarity right away, where you think you know what someone will do next, and when they go the other way it's still not surprising. Often on a set, Allen will improvise a lot, saying something to his actors like, "Use the word 'mellon' in some kind of sentence, because I have a joke to tell." I don't know how this movie was filmed, but it seems fairly obvious Match Point was scripted every word of the way, and with that kind of accuracy that is why it was the best original screenplay for 2006 (or, of 2005. Whichever you prefer).