I share my colleague Pete Hammond’s fascination with Cord Jefferson’s BAFTA win for his screenplay adaptation, American Fiction.
It is no small thing for a self-consciously American story to win a very British award against competition as formidable as Christopher Nolan, especially for a debut film.
Pete has a point when he notes that American Fiction, based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, about a black novelist who hits it big when his send-up of African-American cultural clichés is taken at face value, probably got traction as the only currently Oscar-nominated adaptation that is all about writing.
Fair enough. But I’d go one step more. In fact, American Fiction is the only Oscar-nominated script that takes a serious bite out of contemporary socio-political reality.
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