2nd Inaugural: "What if We Gave Oscars for Books" Preview
The Academy of Literature Reconvenes
On Tuesday the nominees for the Oscars came out and there was the usual media cycle around surprises, snubs, and predictions. In honor of our most important critical film awards, we are once again reconvening The Academy of Literature to hand out equivalent awards to the most critical and commercial successful books of the year.
Last year when we handed out these awards film and books felt like they were in an eerily similar place, with consensus bubbling around a few big films and books.
This year the mediums have diverged significantly. Film has had an incredible year by any standard — maybe one of the best film years ever —with two blockbusters that dominated the cultural conversation in Barbie and Oppenheimer, and numerous masters like Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, and Sofia Coppola among others making films. Meanwhile, in books our year has been dominated by fantasy dragons and TikTok-fueled romance (three Romantasy novels from independent publisher Red Tower topped the New York Times bestseller list last week). Critical consensus and commercial breakouts in the literary and critical space have been harder to find this year, or at least have been decidedly less noisy. There seems to be some stagnation, lack of discovery, as many of the books from two years prior that hit this critical/commercial sweet spot — books like Lessons in Chemistry, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Demon Copperhead — are still hanging around bestseller lists and not being replaced by new publications.
Although we’ll never top the perfect parallel last year of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — two popular pieces of entertainment that dominated their industries despite the historical precedent being against their nerdy subject matter being rewarded — we will once again dive into our book awards whole-heartedly. We’ll breakdown all the categories, and describe the parallels between the Academy Awards, picking the eventual winners in March based on which films actually win the Oscars (feel free to send in any book nominations my way in the meantime!). In honor of the nominee Internet-take-cycle we’ll also be considering some of the books that are in the running based on the Oscar nominations that were released—the snubs, surprises, and front runners.
THE MAJOR AWARDS
Best Picture | Best Book
Best picture is the award given to the film that is the perfect combination of popular but serious in subject matter. Never the biggest movie of the year commercially but definitely well-known and typically political or about the power of film (just like how plenty of lauded books have the power of literature as their core theme). We’ll be matching up this winner with a book whose likability, critical reception, and crossover between regular readers and importance to insiders and tastemakers in the perfect mix.
Director | Masterwork
This will go to a book that may not be the author’s best but is very good and in a long line of a celebrated body of work (think Scorsese winning for The Departed after losing for Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Age of Innocence). Like the Academy Awards, some artsy nominees will sneak in but with no chance of winning (this year, filmmakers Justine Triet and Jonathan Glazer). This award is all about overall respect for a filmmaker/author’s achievements in addition to the movie/book in question.
Best Actor and Actress | Best Writer of the Year
This definition remains the same from last year (nailed it):
We’re scrapping the sex division, which truly makes no sense for any art, and least of all writing. How will best writer differ from best book or masterwork, you ask? This award will have to do more with celebrity and personality as a writer, you’ll have to have written a great book that year which is on the nomination card—sure—but it’s also about the narrative surrounding the person.
Supporting Actor & Actress | Best Work of Genre
Sorry, genre books, like supporting actors and actresses, you get to say “Academy Award winner” for the rest of your life, but it is not as respected as the best actor or actress—although sometimes it should be! Like if you win a championship on a sports team but you aren’t the best player. Is this necessarily fair? Is your performance lesser just because you didn’t write an explicitly literary novel? Of course not. And, also, yes.
Adapted Screenplay | Best Book in an Ongoing Series
We hear you Judd Apatow. In Apatow’s heart I know what he meant by his statement: just because something is built off an existing idea doesn’t mean there isn’t a tremendous amount of originality in it. The same is true of books in a series, but we also can’t pretend like they arose from nothing—IP and ongoing characters make something derivative even if that is not meant in derogatory way (Sorry Judd!).
Original Screenplay | Best Debut Novel
Original screenplay is one of the rare awards that tends to go to actually good movies. Winners have been a bit of a mixed bag in recent years, but the category includes many films that have gone on to be all-time classics in the 90s and early 2000s (Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Good Will Hunting, Almost Famous, Lost in Translation, etc.). The fact that the film that wins this award rarely goes on to be successful in the other awards is just a matter of the winner not having built up enough credibility or being too much of an unknown quantity to be unanimous yet. Screams great debut novelist to me!
Documentary Feature | Best Nonfiction
I love documentaries, I love nonfiction books, but what kind of nonfiction filmmaking and books get awarded? Usually an eat-your-vegetables-and-recognize-something-important-happening kind of project.
International Feature | Best Work in Translation
Self-explanatory.
SNUBS!
Barbie / Happy Place
The main discourse post- this year’s Oscar nominations is about how Barbie—in particular the beloved multi-Academy Award nominated superstars Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie—weren’t nominated for best director and best actress. This despite the film being nominated for eight awards, and both Gerwig and Robbie getting nominated for other Academy Awards (Gerwig for adapted screenplay and Robbie for best picture as the main producer of the film).
All of these nominations for a blockbuster comedy by a voting body that has been historically very unfavorable to this type of movie is really fairly significant. People are still performatively unhappy at the perceived snubs—part of Greta Gerwig’s and Margot Robbie’s star power is that they have cult of personality that great artists do.
Our book analogy for this snub is Emily Henry’s Happy Place. Emily Henry is the blockbuster romantic comedy author that is generally agreed to be a cut above when it comes to blockbuster genre and rom coms. It makes sense, then, that we’re snubbing her for our analogous Academy of Literature awards Best Director/Masterwork and Best Actor/Best Writer. Sometimes being the best at something, whether it is rom com writing or a comedy, IP musical doesn’t mean you’re going to be celebrated come serious award time.
TECHNICAL CATEGORIES
This year The Academy of Literature has reworked some of the technical categories to reflect some of the underappreciated, behind-the-scenes aspects of book publishing and expand the pool of possible winners. Similar to how the technical, “below the line” categories work at the Oscars.
Cinematography | Achievement in Sentence Level Writing
Like the frame is to film, the sentence is to novels. Beautiful sentences certainly help make a book better, and they are essential to a book being good, but as I’ve often argued here at Dear Head of Mine, line-level writing alone can’t make a great book. The same is true of cinematography— it’s a visual medium but you still have to have a story and people in the frame to make the magic happen.
Film Editing | Best Editing
How do we determine this? It’s near impossible. But I’ll use my best insider knowledge to determine where an editor might have had a hand in great editing—whether that be in acquiring a book with low expectations and turning it into something big, actually turning a project into something compelling on the page, or just “publishing something well.” If the previous sentence is confusing, so it is with film for anyone outside the technical profession of “film editing.”.
Makeup and Hairstyling | Best Publicity and Marketing Campaign
See “Film Editing” above, although much more visible to audiences. “Hey that book got a lot of reviews” is analogous in film to something like “look at those great hats.” A great book publishing campaign is hard to sort out, but we’ll try.
Visual Effects | Best Cover Art
For the pure eye-catching-ness of a book cover.
Costume Design | Best Commercial Book Cover
This is likely going to reward something we’re already rewarding for another award, or is a tossed off “great job!” kind of award for something that is well done but didn’t check other boxes for prestige. The slight difference to Visual Effects / Best Cover Art is that we’ll try to reward a cover that is good commercially, not just awesome artistically. Kind of like how this Academy Award often goes to a familiar period piece setting, there is tremendous skill in designing a domestic suspense novel cover with a house on it (which has been done 10,000 times before) in a new and impressive way.
Production Design | Illustrated, Cook, or Photography Book
Celebrating the visual masters of the craft that are sometimes an afterthought next to the big categories, but are nonetheless vital and should be given more respect.
Sound | Best Book Title
A wild card category. This could be an award that helps a front runner stack up wins or go to a totally random blockbuster that people loved and want to give kudos to.
SURPRISES!
Anatomy of a Fall / I Have Some Questions for You
Anatomy of a Fall, a French courtroom-slash-anatomy-of-a-crime drama was nominated for five Oscars including the heavy hitters of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screen Play… and also Film Editing. The central question of Anatomy of a Fall is what happened to the main character’s husband--did he fall out of the window, or jump, or did she push him? It is shocking to see a foreign language film that is essentially a domestic drama rack up nominations in so many of the most prestigious categories. This film is like a lot of well-made European dramas, but has a mystery mixed with psychology that makes it propulsive and a cut above a lot of films that tackle similar themes. And amazing choices, like the extended use of the ultra-chaotic steel drum remix of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P as the soundtrack to the opening scenes of the fall and investigation, shows Anatomy of a Fall’s brilliance in small touches.
Our book equivalent? Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, a literary spin on a true crime story in which a film teacher and podcaster return to her former school where a decade ago her roommate was murdered, unraveling new information that sheds light and makes her question her memory of her time at school all those years ago. A premise that’s not groundbreaking on its surface—there are tons of writers working the true crime, podcasting, protagonist-goes-back-to-confront—a-dark-past premises—but which in Makkai’s hands is elevated to a thought-provoking mystery that stands out in a recognizable dramatic form.
WAIT THERE ARE MORE AWARDS?
Animated Feature | Best Non-Adult Book + Animated Short | Best Picture/Board Book
Going to have to BS my way through giving out these equivalent awards to books, as I have not read a single YA, middle-grade, children’s, or board book from last year.
Documentary Short | Best Book with Origin in a Magazine/News Article
Like with documentary shorts, publishers sometimes throw a bunch of money at viral articles to see how those headline stories stick in book form. Most often, they don’t; sometimes they do.
Live Action Short | Best Short Story or Essay Collection
Two misunderstood categories of books that are vitally important to fostering the creative pursuits of writers and very much a skill in their own right, but rarely get top billing.
FRONT RUNNER!
Oppenheimer / The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In a quiet year for big literary smash hits in books, James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is the runaway critical/commercial success of the year. McBride, like Nolan, is hugely respected in the literary world, but that acclaim has never materialized for him as monumental a way as it has this year. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is an Oprah pick, an Obama pick, Amazon’s #1 pick, a NPR, New Yorker, and Washington Post “best book of the year”, and Barnes and Nobel’s book of the year. It’s also “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel” (Washington Post), entertainment plus gravitas. Like Oppenheimer—Christopher Nolan’s epic biopic about making the atomic bomb—is expected to sweep the Academy Awards and has dominated all of the precursor awards, we expect McBride to clean up come March.
