Abstract
Known for making movies about movies, writer-director Quentin Tarantino reached new heights of Oscar success with the intertextual war film Inglourious Basterds (2009) and the allusive representation of slavery in Django Unchained (2012). This chapter examines both films through the lens of industry recognition by looking at how the history of writing awards at the Academy indicates a shifting relationship to the kind of multi-sourced, cinema-focused adaptation that Tarantino undertakes. The categorization of Tarantino’s writing under ‘Original Screenplay’ shows how contemporary awards culture defines both adaptation and originality, while his success with awards voters has started new cycles of prestige and pushed industry focus away from conventional representations of war and white-centred representation of race relations.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1994, Pulp Fiction tied Inglourious Basterds’s seven Oscar nominations, with a win for Original Screenplay, but none of Tarantino’s intervening films garnered even a single nomination from the Academy. AMPAS technical nominations for Basterds include Cinematography, Editing, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing; Django was also nominated for Cinematography and Sound Editing. Christoph Waltz also took home Best Supporting Actor statuettes for both Basterds and Django. See note 12.
- 2.
This chapter considers the Academy Awards as the standard-bearer for prestige in Hollywood; while the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) are also significant and influential, accounting for them would not be feasible here.
- 3.
- 4.
It should be noted that intramedial adaptations are not limited to screen media. A recent example of a novel that adapts another novel to stinging critical effect is Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête/The Meursault Investigation (2013, English translation 2015), which offers a direct riposte to Nobel laureate Albert Camus’ L’Etranger/The Stranger (1942).
- 5.
Todd Herzog (2012) summarizes the dissenting line of critique for Basterds and offers a compelling comparative study of the film’s reception in the USA and Germany.
- 6.
It should be noted that the Coens’ most gleeful pastiches, including The Big Lebowski (1997) and more recently Hail, Caesar! (2016), have not fared as well as their “straight” adaptations at the Academy. No Country for Old Men (2007) was based on a novel and won Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. True Grit (2011), based on a novel and a 1969 film starring John Wayne, was nominated for a whopping 10 Oscars, including Adapted Screenplay, but won none.
- 7.
A wistful ode to silent film, The Artist also boasts a number of intertextual references, including – perhaps most notoriously – a direct musical citation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Taking a more traditionally adaptation-friendly route, Argo’s Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay recognized Chris Terrio’s reworking of a memoir by Tony Mendez.
- 8.
For Budapest, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig got an “inspired by” credit despite the film’s Oscar categorization as Original Screenplay. Anderson also has experience with novel-to-film adaptation: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), co-written and directed by Anderson, was adapted from a children’s book by Roald Dahl and nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best Music the same year Basterds was recognized by the Academy.
- 9.
Combat films nominated for Best Picture since 2009 include War Horse (Spielberg, 2011), set during World War I, as well as Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) and American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014), both set during the contemporary War on Terror, whose style of warfare requires depictions of combat that depart from earlier war films’ conventions. See Yüksel (2015).
- 10.
The cheeky, though hardly completist Tumblr This Had Oscar Buzz eulogizes The Monuments Men: http://thishadoscarbuzz.tumblr.com/post/132147722215/honestly-forgot-matt-damon-was-in-this-oscar-buzz.
- 11.
The Academy has nominated and awarded films that deal with race relations from a primarily white standpoint, e.g. Driving Miss Daisy (Best Picture winner, 1989), Dances with Wolves (Best Picture winner, 1990), The Blind Side (Best Picture nominee and Best Actress win for Sandra Bullock, 2009), The Help (Best Picture nominee, 2011). The notorious 2004 Best Picture winner Crash, which features a multiracial cast and deals explicitly with racism, was nominated for six Oscars, but all the nominees are white.
- 12.
Amidst the densely layered intertexts of Basterds and Django, it is worth noting Waltz’s sui generis success as the films’ shared star – although Speck (2012) discusses fictional predecessors for Hans Landa, Waltz’s character in Basterds. Tarantino’s usual strategy for star casting has been to select actors with a chequered history: e.g. John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (1994) was nominated for Best Actor for his work in the film, which turned around his languishing career; and Jackie Brown (1997), an Elmore Leonard adaptation, earned Blaxploitation star Pam Grier a number of nominations outside the Academy. In contrast, Waltz had zero Hollywood baggage until Tarantino cast him, yet to date, he is the only actor to win an Oscar for work with Tarantino, winning Best Supporting Actor for both Basterds and Django.
- 13.
See Coulthard (2012) for a discussion of Tarantino’s music, particularly his reuse of Ennio Morricone’s previous work in Basterds. Likewise, Django features Morricone’s earlier music, and for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) Morricone composed an original score that won an Academy Award, the film’s only win out of three nominations (a notable decline after Basterds and Django).
- 14.
Several actors – including comedy star Jonah Hill, whose cameo further underscores the sequence’s comedic intent – are credited as “Bag Head” on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). As the graphic novel adaptation is the only officially published version of the script, this transcription reflects IMDb’s terminology.
- 15.
The goal of this chapter is not to enumerate the intertexts in Tarantino’s films, but as regards the Western component of Django Unchained, one frequently referenced source is Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966); as for Blaxploitation, Mandingo (1975) is a particularly evident intertext.
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Kennedy-Karpat, C. (2017). Trash Cinema and Oscar Gold: Quentin Tarantino, Intertextuality, and Industry Prestige. In: Kennedy-Karpat, C., Sandberg, E. (eds) Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52854-0_10
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