It’s that time of year again so this is a quick respite article from the likes of Lexis Nexis and their endless bad behaviousr…
A film based on a significant literary work hasn’t taken home an Academy Award in over 10 years. But the occurrence rate for Oscar nominations bestowed upon literary adaptations has remained constant since the very first ceremony. Adam Morgan crunched the numbers at the Chicago Review of Books back in 2017 and found that among Best Picture winners, the adaptation to original screenplay ratio averages out to 53%/47%. The same number holds when you expand the figures to the total pool of all Best Picture nominees.
This year, adaptations make up five of the 10 nominees for Best Picture, far more than 2023, 2021, and 2019’s ceremonies, where just two or fewer literary adaptations were nominated. 2024’s Best Picture slate should put literary complaints about the Oscars to rest. But are any of the nominees truly worth celebrating on their own merits? Do the adaptations retain their source material’s literary value? Are the source texts themselves of quality in the first place? And what about the literary value of the original screenplays? Let’s dig in to it all.
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The Academy Award for Best Picture: The Adaptations
American Fiction
Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett
Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jeffrey Wright), Best Supporting Actor (Sterling K. Brown), Adapted Screenplay, Original Score
To my mind, the banner literary news surrounding the 2024 Oscars is the Best Picture nod for American Fiction. Even though Percival Everett, the author of writer-director Cord Jefferson’s source material, wasn’t directly nominated, it’s heartening to see such a hugely deserving literary force recognized. It would be technically incorrect to label a writer “underrated’ after he has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, named a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and shortlisted for both a Booker and a National Book Critics Circle Award, but to his fans, Everett’s wry, direct, unsettling, hilarious, and brilliantly conceptual work feels like the best kept secret in American letters.
Erasure follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Everett’s name-play is unmatched), a literature professor and author of several erudite, high brow books that, let’s say, don’t take pains to court a general readership. Incensed over the success of the latest so-called “ghetto novel,” We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, he decides to write his own to shame the ignorant, carnivorously racist literary establishment. But My Pafology, later retitled Fuck, becomes the next smash hit.
Everything from the A-list cast to the bland retitle suggested that American Fiction might have undertaken a classic prestige bait and switch—to prune the thorns off the rose so Oscar voters feel more comfortable raising it up for acclaim. But evidence of Everett’s teeth remain like gnash-marks throughout the screenplay. Jefferson retains Everett’s bold questioning of whether there might be more dimensionality to stories that appear self-exploitative and tokenizing. But his adaptation falters where many adaptations falter, in the paring away of structural scaffolding that seemed cosmetic but proves to be integral. Everett prints the entirety of Fuck within Erasure. The text within the text becomes a convex mirror, reflecting distorted visions of the characters and their shifting ideologies. American Fiction, in withholding such a disclosure—in perpetrating such an erasure, if you will—remains ideologically fixed. It is a smart movie, and a funny one. But Percival Everett gets the last laugh.
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