The status of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Barbie script at this year’s Oscars continues to be a hot-button topic this week, as writer/director/producer Judd Apatow has now waded into the conversation surrounding the film’s “Adapted Screenplay” designation, calling it “insulting” in a Twitter post on Saturday.
Earlier this week, the Academy’s Writers Branch made it clear that Barbie would be competing in Best Adapted Screenplay, rather than Best Original Screenplay, owing to the fact that Gerwig and Baumbach were working from an existing character when they wrote the script for the film. As we noted at the time, while this ruling can feel a little weird—Barbie is drastically different than pretty much any other form of media to feature the Barbie character to date, and would seem to at least arguably fall under the Best Original Screenplay rubric of not being based on “previously published material”—it is consistent with previous rulings from the Academy. The Lego Movie had to submit for Adapted back in 2014, because it worked from an existing brand, while basically every sequel that’s ever been nominated for a screenplay award (including sequels to original works like Top Gun or Before Sunrise) has done so in the category, due to adapting existing characters.
The really interesting thing about Apatow’s tweet, though—and the general emotional reaction to the ruling that’s broken out over the last week—is the way it suggests that there’s a perception buried in everybody’s heads that Best Adapted Screenplay is somehow a lesser award than Best Original Screenplay; an implication that, since the authors in question didn’t come up with every single aspect of the story they created, it’s not as, well, “original” as one that allegedly comes from whole cloth. Which is a little silly: Gerwig and Baumbach’s Barbie script is undeniably creative, inventive, funny, etc., but it also exists in conversation with the 60-year history and legacy of a character firmly lodged in the public consciousness, and the script wouldn’t function in the same way without those associations.
Interestingly, the Best Adapted/Best Original split has existed, in one form or another, since the very first Academy Awards back in 1929, which handed out statues for Best Writing (Original Story) and Best Writing (Adaptation). The Academy merged and split the categories in different ways for the first several years of the ceremony’s existence, eventually settling into the current dichotomy in 1944, when Best Story (a holdover from the days of the studio system) and Best Original Screenplay were merged into a single category, which ran alongside Best Adapted Screenplay. The upshot of which is that almost every single incarnation of the Oscars has acknowledged, in one way or another, that “adapted” and “original” are meaningful distinctions for written work.
This also means, by the by, that Barbie’s script will be competing in different brackets at different award shows this year; the WGA has already accepted the script as an Original, for instance. (Luckily for tonight’s Golden Globes, they sidestepped the whole thing by only having a single screenplay category in the first place; Barbie will compete against book adaptations Poor Things, Oppenheimer, and Killers Of The Flower Moon, as well as originals Past Lives and Anatomy Of A Fall.)
Laura Davis is an entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to Broadway, she offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
