When Milk wins the Oscar for Original Screenplay on February 22, it will be the first biopic to take the award in 26 years. Back then Gandhi faced some stiff competition, including two fellow Best Picture nominees, Tootsie and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, as well as An Officer and a Gentleman and Diner. And three of these opposing titles were 1982’s three top grossing films. Gandhi’s main obstacle, though, was not one of the other nominees. It was the difficulty of winning a category that’s typically associated with originality. Plenty of movies based on true stories have been nominated for Original Screenplay, but that “based on” factor can be a drawback, and the Academy tends to favor scripts born completely out of the imagination here.
Unfortunately for Milk, that Academy disfavor has been strong for the past three decades, passing over such ‘nonfiction’ films as The Queen, Shine, Nixon, Braveheart, Bugsy, Hotel Rwanda, Erin Brockovich, The Aviator and Good Night, and Good Luck for more “creative” efforts like Little Miss Sunshine. But this year, the ‘fiction’ films nominated for Original Screenplay are not strong candidates, whether for critical, commercial or political reasons. So fortunately for Milk, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black will partly win the Oscar by default. Not all voters will be choosing Milk in a process of elimination, though. Some will actually see that Black has penned a great “original” biopic and that it is indeed the most deserving of the nominated screenplays.
At his Vanity Fair blog, Stu Van Airsdale predicts that Tony Gilroy, writer/director of Michael Clayton, has a decent shot at winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar that most assume Diablo Cody has locked up, and in so doing, reminds us that Gilroy wrote “a figure-skating opus 16 years ago.” That opus, of course, was The Cutting Edge, that staple of staple of self-pitying sick days (oh, is that just me?), starring Moira Kelly as a prissy figure skater and D.B. Sweeney as the hockey player hired to be her partner.
Certainly, I agree with Stu that Gilroy deserves the career award. I’m not really much of a fan of Michael Clayton, but I think as far as hokey sports romances go, The Cutting Edge is pretty much perfect. Above: a fan-created montage of high-pressure skating scenes. That part where he makes Moira Kelly cry right before they skate by saying, “It can’t be any harder to stay together than it was to stay apart,” and then she wipes the tears from her eyes and is like, “I’m in the mood to kick a little ass,” and then they do their ridiculous made-up skating move, and then kiss right there on the ice? It kills me.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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