13. Sling Blade
Won: Best Adapted Screenplay: Billy Bob Thornton, 1996 Probably best known these days as Bad Santa or Lorne Malvo, Billy Bob Thornton's most prosperous awards role to date is actually this, Sling Blade, the 1996 film he wrote (adapting it from his own short film, Some People Call it a Sling Blade), directed, and starred in (he was too Oscar nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role). Playing Karl Childers, Thornton is one of the most peculiar and memorable movie characters of the 1990s, a simple man granted a new lease of life in a small town after being hospitalised for matricide since he was a child. It's Thornton's Oscar-winning screenplay that truly elevates the film, however; a screenplay which beat out heavy hitters like playwright Arthur Miller, nominated for The Crucible, and Kenneth Branagh, nominated for Hamlet, to land Thornton his first and only Oscar to date.