TThe 2024 Oscars will take place on Sunday 10 March and Monday 11. An event awaited by those who love cinema but also good literature, because like every year there are many stories scripted from books. In the Best Film category, this year there are five titles inspired and taken from paper stories. But there is no shortage of novels in other categories too.
The ceremony, hosted for the fourth time by host Jimmy Kimmel and the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, will begin at 7pm local time. In Italy it will be broadcast on the Rai 1 channel starting from 11.30pm on Sunday 10 March, in the company of journalist Alberto Matano.
Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan at the Oscars 2024 in an atomic film
Christopher Nolan’s film – thirteen nominations – is among the favourites. The story is based on biography Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Garzanti) Pulitzer Prize winners.
Film and biography explore the life of an authentic genius of twentieth-century physics. With the realization of the ambitious Manhattan Project together with a team of important scholars, Oppenheimer goes from triumph to descent and moral crisis. The consequences of this impressive invention have led, over the years, to a serious reflection between technique and power.
“Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. (Garzanti)
Poor creatures! Yorgos Lanthimos and a feminist book
Already winner of the Golden Lion at the last Venice International Film Festival, Poor creatures! by Yorgos Lanthimos chooses the novel of the same name by the Scottish writer and playwright Alasdair Gray. It is difficult to remain indifferent when faced with the cinematic and literary portrait of Bella Baxter.
The story is that of the initiatory journey of a woman who has lived twice, who reconstructs herself through a new knowledge of herself. Emma Stone’s performance as Bella and the splendid settings new gothic they won over critics and the public. There are 11 nominations including Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo) and Best Costume Design.
“Poor creatures!” by Alasdair Gray. (Safara)
Killers of the Flower Moon: Martin Scorsese and American history
Ten nominations for one of the greatest directors of all time, which deals with a dramatic event that actually happened in Oklahoma, the massacre of the Osage Indians. At the beginning of the 1900s, this tribe was the richest population in America thanks to the oil deposits present underground in their lands.
Their luck did not last long due to the greed of unscrupulous people. Martin Scorsese adapts the essay The Red Earth Killers: Business, Oil, Murder, and the Birth of the FBI. A frontier story written by David Grann, published by Corbaccio. In the film, the director’s proven fetish actors, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The talented Lily Gladstone is among the favorites to win the Best Actress category. Scorsese himself appears in a cameo.
“Killers of the Flower Moon. The assassins of the Red Earth”. (Corbaccio)
The area of interest: Jonathan Glazer and the banality of evil at the 2024 Oscars
Glazer’s film received the Jury Grand Prix at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and 5 Oscar nominations. Director chose to take inspiration from the novel of the same name by Martin Amis (Einaudi), description of the Nazi horror of World War II through the anomalous daily lives of three characters: the commander of a concentration camp, an officer and Szmul, head of the Sonderkommando, “the saddest men in the Lager”.
From the area of interest in the book – the tree-lined avenue which includes land, workshops and the SS residential center of the Auschwitz/Birkenau camp -, Glazer isolates the villa adjacent to the Auschwitz camp, residence of the camp commander Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel) where he lives with his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and five children. Only the sounds of the camp’s activity can be heard: the screams and gunshots, the chimneys of the fornix lights up the night.
The film also draws on the memoirs of Rudolf Höß (always published by Einaudi with preface by Primo Levi):
“The area of interest”. (Einaudi)
American Fiction: at the 2024 Oscars, films and books with racial stereotypes
The complex drama directed by Cord Jeffersonbased on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, out of print in Italy, received five nominations.
American Fiction is the story of the African-American Thelonious Ellison, professor of English literature and writer, increasingly intolerant of a certain fictitious culture Woke which seems to feed on stereotyped stories about the misery of black people in America. After receiving a series of editorial rejections, he immediately writes a novel with all the racial clichés. Surprisingly, the book becomes a bestseller, triggering a series of uncontrollable events, between reality and fiction.
Cord Jefferson is perhaps the least favorite to win Best Film but expectations are higher for the nomination for Best Screenplay. The cast includes Jeffrey Wright and Sterlin K. Brown, known for the series This is us.
“American Fiction”. (Prime Video)
Literature continues to flow through the veins of cinema and among the other categories of the 2024 Oscars. Worth noting The boy and the heron by Hayao Miyazaki (Best Animated Film): the work is based on a well-known children’s novel by Genzaburō Yoshino, And how will you live?
It’s still, The wonderful story of Henry Sugar by Wes Anderson (Best Short Film). The story of the same name is by the prolific Roald Dahl, the father of Willy Wonka.
The snow society by Juan Antonio Bayona is among the nominees for Best International Film. The dramatic story of the survivors of the plane crash in the Andes is inspired by the book by Pablo Vierci.
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