It’s Oscar season, so it’s time to pay homage to two of the several categories that often don’t get as much attention as they should: Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay. The screenplay is the first step toward making the film. Without a strong script, everything else about the movie—the directing, the acting, the costumes, the set design, the music—can only help so much.

The list of films nominated for the 2024 Screenplay Oscars are almost all nominated for Best Picture as well, which goes to show how integral the well-written screenplay is to the end product. Ranked by their Rotten Tomatoes scores, these films show a variety of styles and structures that all work in unique ways.

10 ‘Maestro’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80%

Directed by Bradley Cooper, Maestro was written by him and Josh Singer (winner of a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Spotlight). Acclaimed conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) was attracted to men and had many affairs throughout his marriage to Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), which lasted until her passing decades later. This film tries to cover their complicated romance over all that time, but it doesn’t seem to have the space to show why he and Felicia stay together throughout his infidelities.

The movie is bookended with Bernstein giving an interview near the end of his life, which tonally evens out with the more fast-paced dialogue (and even a dance sequence) in the movie’s first half. Bernstein’s conducting was given some screen time as well, perhaps because no amount of dialogue could truly convey Bernstein’s inner self in just two hours. The screenplay wisely entrusts the music to fill in some of the gaps that a movie of any length probably could not complete with words alone.

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9 ‘Barbie’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Written by one of Hollywood’s most talented couples (Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig), Barbie was the highest-grossing movie of 2023. Featuring a parallel world in which Barbies, Kens, and one Allan live in a Barbie-led paradise, the movie essentially starts in this peppy and colorful environment. Soon enough, however, the screenplay has to balance the fantasy of Barbie Land with realistic scenes in California. Sometimes the real world is a bit too cartoonish, but overall the movie succeeds at blending emotional gravity and social criticism with surrealist comedy.

With all the other beloved Barbie movies out there, how could this screenplay possibly set itself apart? With an existential crisis, for starters. In the middle of a dance routine, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) cheerfully asks everybody if they ever think about death. The action is key to the tone here, as this and other comical moments depend upon the contrast between a character’s upbeat delivery and the dark subject matter being discussed. On that front, Gerwig and Baumbach earned their Best Adapted Screenplay nomination.

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8 ‘May December’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 90%

Directed by Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch, May December is about an actress named Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) and her efforts to understand Gracie (Julianne Moore) in order to play her in a movie. This requires Elizabeth to visit Gracie’s house and meet her family. Due to the extremely controversial and sensitive romance at the heart of this film, the conversations between Elizabeth (who is famous) and all these somewhat-infamous strangers are both polite and probing.

Told from Elizabeth’s perspective, the movie cleverly makes sure that the bizarre family dynamic is examined from someone who is not only an outsider but also just wants to capture the essence of a relationship. The film almost treats the romance between Gracie and her husband as a mystery that cannot be solved, and the screenplay brilliantly retains enough ambiguity to make the viewer meditate on privacy, consent, truth, and the consequences of having such a publicly controversial relationship. May December definitely earned its Best Original Screenplay nomination.

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7 ‘The Zone of Interest’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

The Zone of Interest takes the perspective of a high-ranking SS officer’s family, who live right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, this script is less about what the characters discuss so much as what they don’t. Most of the characters’ lines are about trivial matters (logistics, gardening, employment, etc.), as if these people aren’t next door to an institution committing mass genocide. This is intentional; Glazer uses more subtle things (like background noise) to contrast the Nazi ideal with the bottomless cruelty it’s built upon.

That said, the premise doesn’t seem to require a 103 minutes to tell. Soon enough, it starts repeating itself without any additional insights about willful ignorance or anything else. The film suggests that we’re all capable of normalizing evil, but the narrative itself is so thin that it seems more like an avant-garde mood piece than a story. Reelviews‘ take is the most instructive: “As a 30-minute or 45-minute short, it would be an incredibly daunting piece of filmmaking.” Based on Martin Amis’s novel, the film is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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6 ‘Oppenheimer’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Christopher Nolan set his screenplay apart from the rest by making it resemble a biography that’s been thrown in the shredder. Oppenheimer uses a relentlessly non-linear narrative to convey the chaotic mindset of its titular protagonist and moral gravity of its subject. About the father of the atomic bomb (played by Cillian Murphy), this story covers his time at university, his troubled romances, his supervision of the Manhattan Project, a court trial, and more.

It’s a bold movie to write this kind of script, especially with the three-hour runtime, but Nolan was able to pull it off and still tell a coherent story. It may come together better the second time around, but the film’s separate storylines are effective. Some say Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt‘s characters don’t get enough screen time for their own characters to develop, and the final act feels like an anticlimax in comparison to what came before. However, the film is still compelling enough to merit its Best Adapted Screenplay nomination.

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5 ‘American Fiction’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Writer-director Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction (based on the novel Erasure) is one of the best directorial debuts of 2023, and the screenplay is one of the biggest reasons why. About a writer named Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who writes an offensive novel out of spite and then sells it for big money, this satire of the publishing industry is hilarious and affecting. The Johnnie Walker analogy to explain why Mr. Ellison’s stereotypical novel is such a success proves demoralizing but apt (empathetic, even), and that is merely one of many scenes that convey disillusionment with the world of book-selling.

One of the best sequences takes place when Thelonious is writing his potboiler, and the audience gets a look into his imagination: Two of the novel’s characters play out the scene as if they’re right in front of him. Besides making the act of typing on a keyboard fun to watch, American Fiction gives each of its characters distinct and important voices. It may not be perfect, but its creativity and humor merit the Best Adapted Screenplay nomination.

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4 ‘Poor Things’

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

Based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things tells the story of a woman (Emma Stone) brought to life in a laboratory for the purposes of science by an esteemed doctor (Willem Dafoe). Bella’s brain starts off very childlike, leaving her with poor speaking and motor skills at first. This leaves writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos plenty of room for slapstick humor and exceedingly strange social interactions. But Bella eventually matures enough to decide that she wants to explore the world, and she does.

The dialogue has to be meticulously done when the protagonist starts with a toddler’s mentality and gradually becomes a well-read adult. Add that Bella has a very stubborn, curious, and unique way of looking at society, and her lines seem even more difficult (and fun) to write. Much of the novel is told from Bella’s husband’s perspective, but Lanthimos decided to tell the movie exclusively from Bella’s: a big decision that is integral to the film’s feminist bent and odd sense of wonder for the world.

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