By Jane Ray
Adapting movies from books is an extremely popular trend. In fact, nine of this year’s Academy Award winning and nominated movies were based on books.
The book adaptation that won the most Oscars was The Revenant by Michael Punke. The grueling story of an early American trapper’s wilderness survival and quest for revenge earned awards for Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Cinematographer.
In fact, all the acting categories were won by book-based films. The movie version of Emma Donoghue’s searing Room, which combined the story of a mother’s love with the grueling account of her abduction, and captivity – all told from the perspective of her five-year-old son – garnered the Best Actress award.
In supporting categories, the adaptation of Giles Whittell’s book Bridge of Spies, the true account of three Cold War prisoners exchanged by American and Soviet agents on a Berlin bridge in 1962, won Best Supporting Actor. Best Supporting Actress went to the movie version of The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff, a novel loosely based on one of the first people to receive sex reassignment surgery in the 1920s.
Best Picture went to Spotlight, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church by The Boston Globe. Betrayal contains the complete findings and reporting of the newspaper’s brilliant investigators who uncovered the horrific revelations about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sexual abuse.
Spotlight also won for Best Original Screenplay, while The Big Short by Michael Lewis (author of The Blind Side) won Best Adapted Screenplay for its story about the collapse of the American stock and housing markets.
Other books whose film adaptations were nominated for Academy Awards include Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (renamed Carol), Andrew Weir’s The Martian, and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.
Stop by the Kyle Public Library, pick up one of these titles, and read the movie!
