Why Authors Want to (and Should!) be Invited to the Oscars

Photographs by Hannah Thomson.

Last night, Paramount finally awarded poor Walter Kirn a ticket to the 82nd Academy Awards after he took to Twitter to air his disappointment about not being invited. His plaintive tweet—“Caution to writers: don't expect that because you write a novel that becomes an Oscar-nominated film that you'll be invited to the Oscars”-- might have sounded whiny to some, but his anguish wasn’t exactly unwarranted. Would it have been fair to deny Kirn some Kodak Theater glory, considering he wrote Up in the Air, the book that became the film, starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick, that is nominated for six awards this year, including best picture and best adapted screenplay?

“I don’t need to see what Angelina Jolie is going to wear. I don’t need to share a smoke in the men’s room with Jack Nicholson. I want to be there with the people who did my book a great artistic service. I want to be there in the same way you want to be at your high school graduation or your best friend’s birthday party,” Kirn said last night, speaking from Montana, before he heard he’d been granted entry to the Oscars. He fairly glowed with praise for the film and the people who created it. “This has been a big break for me, a wonderful opportunity, and the movie that came out of it is one that moved me, one that I feel thrilled to be associated with.”“The movie business really prefers its authors to be dead, or near death,” says V.F. contributing editor Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side, the film adaptation of which was nominated for two Oscars including best picture. Lewis, who will be attending the Vanity Fair viewing dinner instead of the ceremony, is far from death, but he could easily be referring to Christopher Isherwood, who wrote A Single Man but died 24 years before Colin Firth would be nominated for his role in Tom Ford’s film version of the book. “Isherwood would want to go, too,” insisted Kirn.

Winston Groom, the author of Forrest Gump, considered Kirn’s predicament yesterday, before Kirn had been notified he would have a seat: “Somebody is being rude to him. He should figure out some way to fuck them.” Kirn sort of did just that; when he publicly aired his grievance, The New York Times, the New York Post, and New York Magazine, among others, took notice, and the studio was shamed into ponying up that golden ticket. Kirn graciously demurred today, “The process was more complicated and bureaucratic than I understood, and there was a genuine misunderstanding. [Paramount] came through, even when it may be perceived as having happened under pressure, which I don’t think it did.”

Plenty of writers and film people alike would have said that Kirn should never have felt he had to go that far, and that he should never have felt overlooked. It’s not unusual for book authors to attend the Oscar ceremonies. When No Country For Old Men won the 2007 Best Picture, the camera panned out to capture the expression on the face of its famously reclusive author, Cormac McCarthy.

Groom attended the 67th Academy Awards, but when he wasn’t thanked more profusely in the various acceptance speeches for writing the 1986 book that spawned the 1994 Tom Hanks movie, which was nominated for 13 Oscars, and won six of them, he didn’t take it to heart. Dominick Dunne and Pete Hamill were among those to call Groom and express their dismay that Groom was under-lauded, but no matter to Groom: “I said ‘Hey, this ain't the Pulitzer Prizes—it’s the Oscars. It’s the movie peoples’ time to shine. Authors aren't movie stars. It’s not their business to be celebrated for movies. If they're celebrated, it ought to be for the books they write.”

Up In the Air and The Blind Side are not the only movies-from-books nominated this year; journalist Lynn Barber wrote An Education (novelist Nick Hornby adapted it); and there’s Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, which helpfully incorporates the book title and author into the film’s name. (Sapphire has been invited to the ceremony, but Lionsgate did not confirm whether she would be attending; Barber had not been reached for comment by the time this was posted.)

Then of course there are the films nominated in other categories that are based on books: Invictus, A Single Man, The Last Station, Julie & Julia, Fantastic Mr. Fox… and so forth—on the whole, the best movies of the year, Oscar or not. Some even dipped into the creative well of that most ancient and hallowed book, the Bible: A Serious Man and The Secret of Kells.

It’s an old saw that there are no new ideas in Hollywood. Roughly half of the best pictures in Academy Award history sprang from novels or stories, give or take a few of those “loosely based” literary ones, like My Fair Lady (1964 winner; based on Pygmalion, which was based on… Pygmalion), The Deer Hunter (1978 winner; based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1937 novel, Three Comrades), and Million Dollar Baby (2004 winner; based on the pseudonymous F.X. Toole’s story collection, Rope Burns); a chunk of the other half are based on plays—or other movies. A much smaller proportion of best pictures come from original screenplays, hence the Academy’s categorical distinction. And these are only the best pictures we’re talking about—never mind the hundreds of films nominated in every category that all can trace their genesis to some writer’s fine mind. On the rare blockbusting occasion, movies have become books, like Braveheart, which won best picture the year after Forrest Gump. Randall Wallace wrote the screenplay, which also won an Oscar, and novelized it later.

Maybe all writers should get a chance to go to the Awards—if only so they can tell stories about the night itself.

Groom related this Gumpian anecdote:

“Paramount invited me and my wife. We stayed at the Peninsula hotel, and some film crew from one of the celebrity shows began following me around until I threw them off the trail by pointing out a man named Kato Kaelin, who was then a prominent witness in the O.J. Simpson trial.

The night before the ceremony we went to a party at Wendy Finerman's (one of the producers) home in Beverly Hills, which was basically a cross between a cast party and a ratfuck--but all the right rats were there.

At the Oscars we sat next to “Bubba's” [Mykelti Williamson] mother, who was a hoot, and kept jumping up and down and shouting. Afterward we were invited to the Governor's Ball, which is thrown by the governors of the Academy, and was catered by a person delightfully named Wolfgang Puck. I knew I had arrived when I shook hands with the first person in the receiving line: Gregory Peck.”

“All in all,” he surmised, “it was all a lot of fun.”

And Kirn? “I’m thrilled. I want to be part of a celebration of something that happened to me.”

[An earlier version of this piece erroneously stated that Kate Winslet won an Oscar for her work in the film adaptation of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road last year. She in fact won the Oscar for The Reader.]