Best Writing (Original) – 1985

Official Nominations: Witness. Back To The Future. Brazil. The Official Story. The Purple Rose Of Cairo.

I don’t have too many complaints about this category this year – a worthy winner and a solid group. For my own bias, I prefer films with quotable dialogue over just purely well written characters and plots. Back To The Future pushes Witness out in this regard, as barely a week passes without me exclaiming ‘Great Scot’ over some mundane triviality. Brazil is funny, strange, and crisply satirical in equal amounts, while The Purple Rose Of Cairo has Woody Allen on top observant form again. The only one which feels like it shouldn’t be here is The Official Story – not because of its quality, but because it’s a foreign language feature and lacks the memorable, quotable one-liners which appear elsewhere.

My Winner: Back To The Future

My Nominations: Witness. Back To The Future. Brazil. The Purple Rose Of Cairo. Blood Simple. The Breakfast Club. Desperately Seeking Susan. The Goonies. Pale Rider. After Hours.

I remove one and add six to my own choices. Realistically, I think only three of mine were ever in contention for the official selection. Lets start with those. The Breakfast Club was John Hughes hitting the mark between commercial popcorn entertainment, and meaningful coming of age drama, gifting us with an entirely 80s film which remains relevant and enjoyable today. It’s telling, perhaps, that outside of an episode of Victorious, the movie hasn’t been remade. I’m sure it will come. It endures not because of its cast of famous young faces, but because of the characters and their tropes. Even now, across the world, teens have to go to school. Fenced in together, groups and cliques emerge, and even within those cliques individuality struggles to keep its head up, or hide. Hughes was smart enough to be aware of all of this in the 80s, and created one of the seminal school based movies.

Both Blood Simple and Desperately Seeking Susan had an outside chance of getting an official nomination – the Coen’s debut was mostly a critical success, but not widespread enough that their writing style was noticed by The Academy, while DSS unfairly missed out in a number of categories at the Oscars, even though it was a critical and commercial success, with many highlights its characters and satirical writing as major positives. The final film with an outside chance of receiving a genuine nomination, is Scorsese’s After Hours, a comedy about a regular US office drone who experiences a night to forget/remember after meeting an interesting woman in a cafe. It’s one of the last Scorsese movies I got to, but it’s one of his funniest and underseen, showing a seedy side to New York, but one which blends in offbeat characters and Kafka-esque scenarios.

My final two choices had little chance of being nominated in reality, but are notable for their writing. The Goonies lies somewhere between having quotable dialogue, and frequently feeling like much of it was improvised, thanks to the chaotic nature of many of the kids group scenes. Lastly, Pale Rider is another example of Eastwood coming in to his own as a director – working with his writing team to craft yet another multi-layered man with no name who must deal with a dastardly group of ne’er do wells. Peppered with Biblical references, it’s another strong entry in Eastwood’s distinguished filmography.

My Winner: Back To The Future

Let us know your winner in the comments!