Oscars 2024: Books of the Red Carpet

These books inspired some of the best films of the past year and have been adapted into Oscar-nominated screenplays. Let's take a look at the nominees...

This year, I set myself the challenge to read the original works behind the Best Adapted Screenplay category and it's been a great dive into the rich and varied texts that inspired this year’s nominees. Our cast list? The charismatic father of the atomic bomb, a frustrated black writer tackling family struggles and the publishing world at large, a Victorian woman with the transplanted brain of a baby, a Nazi nuclear family unravelled by jealousy and revenge, and…a doll (we'll get to that later).

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. This is a behemoth of a biography. Clocking in at 736 pages of meticulous research, American Prometheus was 25 years in the making. And it shows. Christopher Nolan clearly had a lot of material to work with here - most of all, the vivid and complex portraits of those in Oppenheimer’s vast orbit. His two loves, Kitty Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock, are prime examples here with enough material to fill their biographies in their own right. Overall, American Prometheus is an ambitious, well-executed tome that brings to life the raw magnetism of Oppenheimer and his story.

Poor Things by Alasdair Gray is a twisted, science-fantasy set in Victorian Glasgow where we see a baby's brain transplanted into the body of a woman.Yes, you heard that right. Poor Things follows protagonist Bella Baxter on her bizarre journey of awakening. It is a fantastical, Frankenstein-inspired depiction of a life lived subversively and without shame - as Bella fights to forge her own path against an unforgiving world. The novel is bookended with a kind of ambiguity that casts doubt over whether any of it happened. I don't exactly love this type of trope. That said, Poor Things is still an entertainingly off-keel and playful story. Much like its movie adaptation.

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis: This is a bloody clever book. The Zone of Interest is a holocaust novel couched in allusion - nothing is said directly. Auschwitz is ‘Kat Zet’, the gas chambers are the 'Little Brown Bower’, bodies are not buried in mass graves but in ‘The Spring Meadow’. Dialogue drips with cruel, black irony. It is very effective, at times bitterly comedic, and often sinister. The sensorial (and especially sound) serves an important function in Amis’ allusive story-telling (and that of its adaptation). It’s a challenging but highly engaging read. To give you a flavour, I leave you with this: “The last word was still on her tongue when we heard something, something borne on the wind… It was a helpless, quavering chord, a fugal harmony of human horror and dismay [...] But then came a shrill silence”.

American Fiction by Percival Everett: I am three-quarters of the way through so these aren’t my final thoughts. But so far - this book is brilliant. It is a bitingly witty and bittersweet story about a literary writer battling family struggles, sluggish book sales and a problematic publishing industry that doesn’t think he’s ‘black enough’. Originally published in 2001, Erasure still speaks to our current moment and the ongoing conversations in the publishing world. Brandon Taylor puts it perfectly in his 2021 foreword - ‘Everett’s sublime, satirical novel of ideas [...] is animated by the question of whether or not it’s possible for a black artist to create art that is itself ambivalent to the constructedness of blackness’.

Barbie by Mattel: ??? It’s somewhat surprising but Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay has found itself in the Adapted category, not original. There is no single book to point to but rather a diffuse web of commercial output. Perhaps I can just stare at a childhood Barbie for long enough to tick this one off my list but alas my mother refused to buy me any as a kid. It was only Disney Mulan dolls for me (she saved China from the Huns, you know).