2. Kelly Marcel - Saving Mr. Banks
Hollywood, being populated by extremely severe narcissists, is endlessly fascinated with movies dealing with its own legend and lore. Films such as Sunset Boulevard, The Player, and The Aviator, movies that at least tangentially deal with inside Hollywood baseball, all did enormously well with the Oscars, and each film was a recipient of a writing nomination as well. This is why, at a minimum, we have to consider the possibility of Saving Mr. Banks receiving a Best Original Screenplay nomination. The film, which is co-written by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith (who don't have much of note in their resumes), tells the hereto untold story of how iconic animator and film mogul Walt Disney courted author P.L. Travers to let him adapt her book, Mary Poppins, into a feature film. The film will reportedly give us a glimpse into the making of the movie as well considering that B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman play the classic musical's composers, the Sherman Brothers, Victoria Summers and Kristopher Kyer appear respectively as Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, and, of course, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson portray Walt Disney and P.L. Travers in the film's primary roles. Mary Poppins being the legendary classic that it is, perhaps the most highly thought of live-action film in the Disney catalog, any movie chronicling its journey to fruition will obviously receive a fair amount of attention. What worries me about the film though is that Disney is producing the film itself. This pretty much guarantees anything that might be construed as the least bit controversial, especially when it comes to the image of the corporation's Holy Father himself, will surely be whitewashed out and stamped with the bleached-white sparking smile Disney had patented years ago. Personally, I tend to think this approach will lead to a boring film, but beyond my own personal taste, I suspect manufactured "drama" won't sit so well with the Writers branch either, even if the film as a whole plays well with the Academy. As we saw with last year's Hitchcock, "behind-the-scenes" films of cinematic classics don't always pan out so well. If Saving Mr. Banks turns out to be little more than, "Oh look, it's that famous person playing that other famous person," or, "Isn't that an interesting anecdote about that great scene in that classic movie," then I wouldn't bet on the film being anything more significant than a humorous footnote in the history of cinema.