Oscar Nominations for Fantastic Beasts: Nothing for ‘Best Original Screenplay’?

We have this year’s Oscar nominations for the films released in 2016. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them received two nods from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the categories of production design (Stuart Craig) and costume design (Colleen Atwood). Betting odds at the time of this posting have 17/3 for Costume Design, fourth out of five, and 11 to 1 (ouch) for production design, a category the gamblers have all but ceded to La La Land.

This is exactly in keeping with the performance of the eight Harry Potter franchise films on Oscar night. Those films, still the most lucrative franchise of all time not featuring comic book heroes (or adding the new Disney Star Wars to the Lucas Films haul), received 12 nominations in six categories and won exactly zero Oscars. The nominations never included a ‘Best’ picture, actor, actress, supporting actor or actress, screenplay adaptation, director, cinematography, editing or either sound editing or mixing. Nada.

You’d think, frankly, that the Academy was made up of cranky Potter Pundits who think the films were a disaster that so despoiled the imaginative experience of the Hogwarts Saga that they deserved only a Razzie (Special Achievement). Folks like me! But we know that is not true. So where’s the love? Can ten gazillion Potter film fans be so wrong about the Warner Brothers cash cow? Are the movies just high gloss schlock?

I’m not a movie guy so I’m out of this discussion, that is, any conversation beyond noting that the professionals in Hollywood sure don’t like the Wizarding World movies. 

I bring all this up, despite knowing almost exactly nothing about film making, to note one thing about the Oscars this year, the nominations that Fantastic Beasts scratched out, and the lack of success of the Potter franchise through the years and, it seems, Beasts this year to win anything, even a nomination in a category of note. 

Fantastic Beasts, unlike all the Potter films, was eligible for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay.

This year they snubbed J. K. Rowling, The Presence Herself.

I can hear your objections. “Of course she wasn’t nominated for ‘Best Writing’! It was her first attempt at a screenplay. She and her fans should be thrilled she wasn’t short-listed for 2017’s Worst Writing, Golden Raspberry.”

Fair enough. Having studied the screenplay that was published, however, and read too many of the interviews with screenwriter, producer, director, actors and actresses involved, I feel obliged to note that what we got on the screen wasn’t what Rowling wrote.

We knew of seven scenes that were cut before yesterday’s announcement that the DVD will include eleven deleted scenes. And these aren’t just lost overviews of Gotham in the 20’s. These are story elements as important as, say, the ending of the film, the unnecessary bit (?) in which Rowling showed Credence Barebone alive and boarding an ocean liner. Or the scene of the MACUSA auror Graves having the vision which drives him to pressure Credence for information about his family.

Not only do those deletions from the shooting script create a different story than the one Rowling wrote, I think it is fair to say they changed the entire story experience. To the point, they obscure the artistry Rowling the story teller (and, oh yeah, best selling novelist of our time) brought to the table as screen writer, the ring writing that caused Lin-Manuel Miranda to call her “The Master of Reprise.”

Would Rowling have deserved a nomination if the Davids had filmed the shooting script and left it as the film we saw in theaters? We’ll never know. What we do know is that whatever the Academy thought of as “failings” in her work are just as likely the fruit of the determination of her producer and director — who in all their collaborations, to repeat myself, have netted exactly zero Oscars — to make her Fantastic Beasts script into a movie that conforms to conventional formula. Rowling described the process of working with them in her Original Screenplay acknowledgments, along with some nicer modifiers, as both “exasperating” and “infuriating.”

Here’s hoping her next contract includes a clause about ‘final cut approval’ so there might be a chance that the next time a Beasts film is up for an Academy Award we don’t have to re-run this post.