Best Original Screenplay
Nominees:
Another Year, Mike Leigh
The Fighter, Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson and Keith Dorrington
Inception, Christopher Nolan
The King's Speech, David Seidler (WINNER)
The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg
In one way, this is a championship battle: Seidler's well-crafted, very traditional script vs. Nolan's precipitous plunge into a multilevel dream world; a screenplay defined by its characters' articulate (if stumbling) dialogue vs. one whose dexterity is in its twisty construction; the movies' eloquent, literary-theatrical past vs. its vivid, video-game future.
Nah, that won't happen. The King's Speech has this category locked. Inception must content itself with craft-category door prizes. And the three indie-style scripts filling out the Best Original Screenplay quintet — including Another Year, which was largely improvised by Leigh's actors, and The Fighter, with nearly as many men cited as co-authors as a championship boxer has in his entourage — are just onlookers. They're like hippies picketing a royal wedding.