La La Land for best picture Oscar? Now that´s not a novel idea
(The Guardian Books Blog)

Fences, Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea ... why are there no novel adaptations on this year´s Academy Award shortlist?If La La Land is named best picture at the Oscars tomorrow, it will be the third time in a row a film based on an original screenplay - not a book - has taken the supreme award. And whichever nominee gets the nod, it won´t be a novel adaptation, because there are none on the shortlist - Fences and Moonlight are derived from plays, Arrival from a short story and Hidden Figures and Lion from non-fiction, while Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water and Manchester by the Sea are also original scripts. Tellingly, it´s now a decade since the last time a US novel (Cormac McCarthy´s No Country for Old Men) became a best picture-winning movie.Fifty years ago, books and films enjoyed a happy marriage, basking in the mutual advantages of a relationship reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn´s celebrated apercu on Astaire and Rogers, `he gives her class and she gives him sex appeal`: between 1962 and 1969, every best picture winner had a literary source including works by Fielding (Tom Jones), Dickens (Oliver!) and Shaw (My Fair Lady). Even as recently as the early noughties, four consecutive winners - A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, The Lord of the Rings, Million Dollar Baby - were either directly or ultimately text-based. Now, though, the couple have parted, not yet divorced but on frosty terms. Continue reading...