In 1942, Hellman received an Academy Award nomination for her screenplay for the film version of "The Little Foxes". Two years later, she received another nomination for her screenplay for "The North Star", the only original screenplay of her career. She objected to the film's production numbers that, she said, turned a village festival into "an extended opera bouffe peopled by musical comedy characters", but still told the "New York Times" that it was "a valuable and true picture which tells a good deal of the truth about fascism". To establish the difference between her screenplay and the film, Hellman published her screenplay in the fall of 1943. British historian Robert Conquest wrote that it was "a travesty greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but experienced in collective-farm conditions."