2014 Muriel Awards: Best Screenplay

On a number of occasions, voters have asked me why the Muriel Awards don't separate the Best Screenplay category into two sections- Original and Adapted- like the Oscars do. Apart from the obvious reason (we don't want the Muriels to wear out their welcome from dragging on too long), I'm honestly sure why Steve and I decided against doing it this way. However, I think part of the reason is because, like the Best Music category we unveiled earlier this week, we didn't want to recognize the screenplay itself so much as how integral the writing of a film was to its overall success.

Now, some of you might argue that the process of creating a film from whole cloth is fairly different than adapting pre-existing material into cinematic form, and you wouldn't be wrong. But consider also the borderline cases like 2009 winner Inglourious Basterds (a so-called "original" screenplay that owes a fairly-sized debt to numerous older films), Whiplash (which was campaigned alternately as original and adapted at various points this awards season), and to a certain extent, this year's winner. In the end, it's just easier and cleaner to avoid the distinction and make this award a way for us to congratulate a movie for having awesome writing, no matter the source.

Third place:

Boyhood [written by Richard Linklater] (77/12)

Second place:

Inherent Vice [screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon] (140/21)

And the Muriel Award goes to...

The Grand Budapest Hotel [story by Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, screenplay by Anderson, inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig] (176 points / 25 votes)

"The degree to which one Wes Anderson film can be better than another is fairly slim. He is who he is, and his style is his style, but there's something about The Grand Budapest Hotel that's ever so slightly above, better, greater, more 'Wes' than his other work. In strict writing terms, he fully embraces his seeming contradictions—between nostalgia and cynicism, between light comedy and extreme melancholy—while, contradictorily, ignoring them and plowing full speed ahead.

"Structurally, while on the subject of self-reflexive honesty, The Grand Budapest Hotel is his most openly literary script to date. Books and readers' relationship to them loom large in Wes Anderson's preoccupations, recurring to degrees in every one of his films, but here the entire film is built around the layers of subjectivity in reading. A reader reads writing by a writer who reads writing written by an earlier writer and so on down that particular rabbit hole, with each successive reader reading through the filter of their own experience, and so every successive layer in The Grand Budapest Hotel becomes more grandly and beautifully unreal, until we get to the figure at the heart of the thing, M. Gustave, who seems too good be true, because he is, and his being real is beside the point because what matters is what he means to the reader.

"If one was seized with the desire to be an utter killjoy, one could argue that these layers of unreality are a shield against the real world and to be thus ensconsed is a deliberate measure of avoiding the truth. But fuck that. The world sucks and make-believe is fun. And essential. Long live Wes Anderson." ~ Danny Bowes

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