I left a comment on Leigh’s recent article sarcastically mocking the limited success of many literary adaptations in Hollywood. My feelings are different, however, than feeling that books are usually better and adaptations are just pale facsimiles or outright screw-ups.

I haven’t even completed a fictional novel in a few years, because I’m a movie person. Emotionally and intellectually, I draw far more nourishment from film and music than I do from literature. If I have time to read a book, I prefer non-fiction. These aren’t value judgements, but statements of preference. A certain number of people will always continue to make stuffy and vacant differentiations between high and low culture. There is, however, no real point in the 21st century (and pointing out the century is always a great way to lend unearned significance to a statement) of making such arbitrary faux-elitist distinctions.

While it is true that many film adaptations of lack much of the depth and quality of their source material, the same can be said, and possibly to a greater extent, of movie novelizations. It should also not be overlooked that there are, in fact, many movies that significantly improve upon their literary source material. The examples that immediately strike me are the films of Stanley Kubrick (the exception being Lolita, which is a sly film with a great performance by Peter Sellers, but not by any means an improvement on Vladimir Nabakov’s classic), all of which bring a dimension to their stories through film language that elevates them well beyond their book sources.

Leigh’s choice of this year’s Best Picture nominees as a sample set was probably a bit skewed. Rather than say Hollywood relies on literature (which they rely on a lot less than they do old TV shows and horror movies), it is more the case that the Academy likes to nominate literary adaptations. Because the Academy is stuffed with middlebrow nitwits who think an unimaginative adaptation of an old novel must be brimming with taste and prestige. Here is a selective history of middling literary adaptations that have wone Academy Awards, and the great original movies that lost to them.

2001 Best Picture – A Beautiful Mind was a pedestrian film based on Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 non-fiction Pulitzer nominee. In the same year we saw Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Devil’s Backbone, Pootie Tang, L.I.E., Amelie, Baby Boy, Wet Hot American Summer, Frailty, Moulin Rouge!, Human Nature, The Deep End, and How High.

1996 Best Picture – The English Patient, a plodding, interminable adaptation of Michael Odaatje’s novel. Did we really think we liked this movie or would remember it ten years later? But do we remember Fargo, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Paradise Lost, Get On The Bus, I Shot Andy Warhol, When We Were Kings, Kingpin, The Pillow Book, Breaking the Waves, or Everyone Says I Love You?

1994 Best Picture – Forrest Gump redefined “pandering” for the self-elected most important generation ever by taking major landmarks and signifiers of American social change and using them as the backdrop for the wacky antics of a soulful mental defective. Based on Winston Groom’s novel, the film was released in the same year as Hoop Dreams, Three Colors: White and Red,Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Lion King, Crooklyn, Exotica, Death and the Maiden, Eat Drink Man Woman, Crumb, Ed Wood, Muriel’s Wedding, and Natural Bork Killers.

1989 – Driving Miss Daisy, based on the play by Alfred Uhry, fondly nostalgizes interactions and traditions which range from difficult to watch to inducive of violence and/or nausea for many black people. In the same year Spike Lee unveils Do The Right Thing. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Drugstore Cowboy, Glory, Heathers, Roger & Me, Sex, Lies & Videotape, and Say Anything also drop.

I was really hoping to get all the way down this list tonight, as it has done a great job of filling up downtime at work. Alas, time draws short. I’m not trying to make a film vs. book argument (though I do think the “book is better than the movie” opinion has become one of those knee-jerk assessments people don’t even think about). The point I hope this starts to illustrate is that the Oscars in particular will often gladly overlook several original works that may actually stand a chance of sticking around and inspiring people in the medium of film if they have the opportunity to award a mediocre movie based on a book they feel they should have read.

So, yeah, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences: if you love books so damn much, why do you bother making movies?