What if the Oscars were for books?

Applications are open for the inaugural Academy of Literature

The Oscars for Books

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After lots of happening in the first part of the year: year-end lists, a documentary about editors and a million copy first week, absolutely wild memoir by Prince Harry, it’s been a slow news week in books. This is not surprising, the first months in publishing are always a less flashy affair without the busy holiday retail push or beach-read and thriller days of the summer. The spring season (at least in my publishing experience there’s no winter season, which is slyly brilliant) is a calmer time, one to get away from the noise and discover new favorites. If there’s something I could borrow from elsewhere in the entertainment world for books it would be the Oscar nomination list, which flew out to all corners of the Internet last week. The nominations predictably drum up excitement and conversations as people rush to see the nominated films (me included) most of which are on the artsy side of film spectrum and get extra attention as a result.

I like our current book awards, but they are mostly “best” awards or “best of x” (romance, mystery, etc.) awards. There is something worth replicating in the Oscars about the range and weirdness of the categories as well as the technical categories that non-professional moviegoers mostly don’t understand. It got me thinking, what would the Oscars look like if we did it for books? What would be the book equivalent to the biopic, which always reigns mighty in the acting categories? What would be our high-production value war movie? What would be our much-maligned best picture winners? Our Crash? Our Green Book? Would romance be the horror movie equivalent at the book Oscars (i.e. the beloved genre that gets overlooked again and again)? In lieu of book news, I am going to attempt to recreate the Oscars for books, category by category.

TOP BILLING

Best Picture | Best Book

This in practicality would shake out just like the Oscars. Nonfiction (i.e. documentaries) aren’t nominated, and the best book award will generally be given to a “serious” book, but one that a lot of bookish people have actually read—the fictional Academy of Literature in this thought exercise—but definitely a book that is not, you know, the most popular. We’re looking for something that’s important in subject, but also enjoyable in a way that makes literary readers feel important, smart and/or moral for liking it. Lots of books with timely themes will end up getting nominated but the old classics will win out—a nice hero’s journey based on a personal experience, a sprawling family epic, say, or books about writers and books.

Director | Masterwork

Given to a writer—in practice it would work out to a lot of seasoned, literary authors—who has produced something of technical brilliance and artistry. Sometimes it aligns with the crown jewel of the awards but often it’s an industry favorite who makes movies that have high style and everyone respects. I feel someone like Ann Patchett would win this award, like ‘damn that’s an impressive work, flawlessly constructed and we respect the hell out of it’, but maybe she also gets snubbed for the big time because she doesn’t hit those historically “Important” novel topics.

Best Actor and Actress | Best Writer of the Year

We’re scraping the sex division, which truly makes no sense for any art, least acting, and least of all writing. No doubt the Oscars didn’t choose to make this “best performance” from the outset because then we’d just have a rather boring awards show with no women and an upsettingly small number of acting winners who weren’t men.

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. Maybe they write some other things that year, a poetry collection, a screenplay, a scathing op-ed, a music album. The understood but not official formula would be something like: nominated book + public persona + narrative + body of work of the year. Think Leo winning for The Revenant or the Brendan Fraser story this year, or Andrea Risborough’s last minute campaign to get a nomination. Let’s get a little bit of literary-author-as-celebrity back into our lives.

Supporting Actor & Actress | Best Work of Genre or Memoir

Best Work of Genre or Memoir allows for some “category fraud” as I’ve heard it be called in the Oscars (basically a lead actor or actress submitting in the softer supporting category if they don’t think they have a chance above the fold). Same principle here, if book doesn’t think they have what it takes in a packed field in the above categories they can lean on their genre elements and come on down. Memoir gets put with genre in a confusing, not totally logical way, which like supporting roles for actors really range from people who are on screen for two minutes to borderline co-leads. Just like a fantastic character actor some great writer will rack up the wins in this category but never have the star power to win the more prestigious Best Book or Best Writer of the Year awards.

Adapted Screenplay | Best Book in an Ongoing Series

I love the idea of giving series authors their props and also separating them out from other fields as it does feel like something completely different.

Original Screenplay | Best Debut Novel

Not the most exciting award on this list, but a nice counterbalance, Best Debut and Ongoing Series mirroring the Original and Adapted Screenplay split in the Academy Awards.

Documentary Feature |Best Nonfiction

This will obviously go to something very serious and important, and (rarely) something nice and uplifting but also serious and important. Why does nonfiction get only one award even though it makes up a huge part of the industry? Good question.

International Feature | Best Work in Translation

Self-explanatory, hopefully like the Oscars we’d see a slow creep of these nominations into the other categories (specifically, Parasite for best picture).

TECHNICAL CATEGORIES

The technical categories are a vastly underrated part of making the Oscars such a great award show, these build the tension into our quote-unquote major awards and give credit to the hard workers behind the scenes and let single films (or in our case books) rack up a high trophy count. Like the Oscars this encompasses a lot of categories that normal readers will sort of understand but that will really be for the industry and the rare people who care far too much about books.

Cinematography | Best Sentence Writing

This would go to the best pure sentence writer. Someone who really runs with language in a special way (but remains coherent). Cormac McCarthy would be the Roger Deakins of this award, just nominations and wins all over the place, and someone who keeps delivering no matter what age he is.

Film Editing | Best Editing

This would be crazy and a lot of tea—and blood—would be spilled as editors would basically have to toe the line of telling how much work they did on something that’s revered without embarrassing or hurting their author’s feelings. It would be antithetical to much that I believe about how an editor should be, but it would be a crazy amount of fun. Again, normal people would wonder what the hell was going on and have no idea why someone was nominated or won—just like how I personally feel about film editing, I know it’s important but have no clue what the process of doing it is or how it’s possibly judged for the Oscars. For example, I’ve heard that Bohemian Rhapsody was a super messy end product in terms of editing, but it got a lot of editing nominations and awards because the film editors pulled the film off from an absolute dumpster fire of underlying material. Bring me the book version of that all day.

Original Song and Score | Best Lyric or Verse

Oh, you didn’t think you were getting music in these book awards, but we’re bringing in best lyric or verse to pull in an extra discipline, just like the Oscars. We add a whole other letter to the EGOT and that’s how we get relevant and hopefully Taylor Swift, Rhianna, or Kendrick Lamar to show up to our award show for books.

Makeup and Hairstyling | Best Character

It’s about time we give credit to one of the most important elements of a novel, and the kookier the better. Genre writers of all stripes are welcome.

Visual Effects | Best Scene in a Novel

Like visual effects, this would be so hard for a normal reader to understand what this is actually judging but also kind of easy to see? Once a bunch of insiders spend a copious amounts of time reading and nominating scenes that is. Another true book nerd, writer, and editor category.

Costume Design | Best Historical/Period Details

It doesn’t need to be a strictly “historical novel” but it has to show the work in a big way, crammed with details and research. Readers love to hear fiction authors talk about the arduous work they put into creating fictional worlds that seem real, the campaign trail for this would be fierce.

Production Design | Best Setting and Descriptions

Writers love to talk about craft, and it would be really fun to debate this stuff on a granular level. Most normal people won’t care, but they’ll see the winner and think something like “that makes sense, I do sort of like those three paragraphs on the sky and clouds that I read as part of the nomination.” Big city novels would dominate this category: New York, Bombay, Toyoko, and people would get tired of it, but also not get too bent out of shape because it’s not one of the headlining awards.

Sound | Best Plot

This would be given for the book with the most ineffable“page-turning” quality. Like sound in film, the swiftness of a plot and ease of reading is not the focal point of the novel itself, but very necessary. Also once isolated and identified, the value becomes much more obvious as a very worthy and important skill.

WAIT THERE’S MORE AWARDS?

Documentary Short | Best Book with Origin in a Magazine/News Article

It would be cool to highlight how, frankly, a lot of books get made.

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 that rarely get top billing.

Animated Feature | Best Non-Adult Book

Children’s, middle grade, young adult all get put into one thing here and never breaks into the other categories, it is unfair but it is what it is.

Animated Short | Best Picture/Board Book

The easiest to catch up on and review in theory, but no one does it (besides the parents of young children).

Back Matter: Links and Other Happenings

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The Ticketmaster Saga, and cringe-worthy Taylor Swift references at the subsequent hearings as Senators try to gain cool points. Book Twitter is dying, and in unrelated news this was going to be the first newsletter I planned on Tweeting out. This anti-aging regime that costs millions a year sounds awful, the caption to one of his meals is the scariest thing I’ve ever read “One of Johnson’s regular meals, pre-blender” (emphasis mine) and the references to the “ages” of his organs are equally as worthy of a horror novel. The incredible profile of 1 of 20 Stratovarius violin restorers in the world, good timing if you’re in midst of the violin thriller that many (myself included) are reading.