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The Writers Guild of America have released their nominations for the best original, adapted and documentary screenplays of the year. The good: recognition for Boogie Man, Burn After Reading and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The bad: some of the least original, most cliche-ridden scripts of the year got noms, including Milk, Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire. The will-be-judged-by-history-as-criminal: Synecdoche, NY and My Winnipeg were overlooked. Blerg, WGA. Blerg. Variety has the full list of nominees.
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You think Vicky Cristina Barcelona deserves a WGA nomination? I thought the writing was absolutely terrible. The dialogue that the actors were forced to emit was robotic at best, definitely nothing real humans would say, and the narration was unbelievably bad. Calling it “unnecessary” would be euphemistic.
I do agree with you on one thing, though: Milk and BB were hackneyed to the point of unintentional comedy. And the overlooking of Synecdoche, New York (and My Winnipeg too, though to a lesser degree.) Was, yes, criminal, but expected, and very sadly so.
If you read VICKY as a film that’s trying to be sympathetic to its characters, then yes, the writing would seem trite, the acting stilted, and the narration on-the-nose. But if you read it (as I believe it’s intended) as an evisceration of its characters and their milieu, which would be much more in line with the sour class studies that Allen has increasingly pumped out in between more straightforward romances since the 80s, then it’s all just right.
Well, I’m not going to pretend I even considered that reading of VCB, and do think you may be on to something that I may have missed entirely.
But still, even if what you say is entirely accurate and that was Allen’s intention, I feel that there may be better ways of simultaneously poking fun at and illuminating the various (and varying in degrees) quandaries that his characters find themselves in.