Oscar Snubs Part 1: Best Original Screenplay—(500) Days of Summer

Every day this week, recess will be correcting the Academy with our own list of shouldabeen-nominees. These are films that, for whatever reasons—probably none of them good—were stiffed out of rightful recognition, and they deserve to be seen and appreciated in their own right. We'll run through the major categories day-by-day, starting today with Best Original Screenplay.

Film: (500) Days of Summer

Falling in love is hard on the knees. Steven Tyler sang it, He’s Just Not That Into You beat it over our heads with beautiful faces last February, and Valentine’s Day is here to do it again this year with twice the Botox and Taylor Swift. But a film like 500 Days of Summer didn’t need a hot mess of intertwining faux-lationships to send the message. It had the power of pure emotion and an utterly seamless script.

Co-writer Scott Neustadter teamed up with Michael H. Weber to unchronologically chronicle Neustadter’s real-life disenchantment with love. Neustadter had had his heart broken by “the one,” and like the majority of the planet, he thought he was the first. Lucky for him, friend and intern Weber was intrigued by his ill fortune and encouraged Neustadter to channel his heartache into a screenplay.

The skeleton is a boy-meets-girl story. The boy is Tom Hansen  (Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing piteous to perfection) and the girl is Summer Finn (an irresistibly icy Zooey Deschanel.) Tom tries not to fall in love with Summer, who isn’t looking for anything serious, fails, and has his take on love tweaked. And there is no way the Oscar is going to…

What sets this rom-com apart is its patchwork exploration of the fantastical journey of love. As the title notes, we watch Tom and Summer through the 500 days it takes them to meet, date and fall victim to fate. But invested with the power of time, Neustadter and Weber take advantage of this creative privilege, letting the script leap from day four to 58, in a fashion that invigorates the milestones in a relationship. An unforgettable instance is when a love-drunk Tom skips down the street to Hall & Oates “You Make My Dreams” as a cartoon bluebird lands on his shoulder and a marching band trumpets behind him. This sequence is immediately cut with a disconsolate Tom, who has hit rock bottom post-Summer. This temporal conceit renders the boy/girl blueprint airtight and exhilarating.

With ten slots to fill, this diamond-in-the-rough rom-com deserved a Best Picture nomination and was completely robbed in the Original Screenplay category. Yes, war stories are relevant, and Pixar is Uplifting, but 500 Days was the refreshing breath of modern romance its tired genre needed. Either way, I’ll still be keeping my fingers crossed for Quentin.  The only thing better than a good love story is a Bear-Jew.