Oscars 2024: Why ‘Past Lives’ should win ‘Best Original Screenplay’
The ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the 2024 Oscars looks set to be a testy battle between some seriously fierce competitors, each of which stands a solid chance. The category nominations this year are The Holdovers, May December, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall and Maestro, and while each work of cinema is certainly deserving of its nomination, it’s Celine Song’s romantic drama Past Lives that ought to take the big prize.
Song’s debut is a completely heartbreaking piece of film that unflinchingly dives headfirst into exploring how the kind of romantic connections we form in our past can inevitably inform our present and features magnetic performances from the likes of Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro, an excellent and tender score by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen and intelligent cinematography by Shabier Kirchner.
But the real brilliance of Past Lives is in Song’s screenplay itself, serving not only as a captivating story in its own right but also as a clever examination of the nature of romance. Plus, it’s an excellent example of one making the transition from the theatrical stage to the cinematic one, with Song’s previous experience coming mostly from the theatre.
Song had written and directed the plays Endlings and The Seagull on The Sims 4, which were both performed at the New York Theater Workshop off-Broadway in 2020. After working as a staff writer on the fantasy television show The Wheel of Time, Song arrived on the big screen with Past Lives, a truly remarkable work that showcased her deep talent for storytelling.
In detailing the conflicted feelings we often experience as we move through life, as per childhood friends Na Young and Hae Sung, Song touched on the more confusing aspects of love whilst managing to reference Korean religion and philosophy, plus the nature of fate a la Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, showing that at heart, the Past Lives screenplay is a deeply literary one, which makes sense considering Song’s theatrical background.
What’s also important in Past Lives’ claim for the award is that the film is semi-autobiographical and was inspired by real events from her life. Like Na Hung, who takes the Westernised name Nora, Song emigrated to Canada when she was 12 years old, eventually using the name Celine rather than her birth name Ha-yeong. In that light, the power of Past Lives grows in stature, and its emotion-shattering nature that breathes a sense of deep realism is more understandable.
Song has simply written from the heart with her directorial debut, and when thinking of the merit of a story, one must think of its impact on an audience. The truth is that there were few films from the past year of release that had quite an emotional impression as Past Lives, though perhaps its most fierce competitor in the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ category in that light is The Holdovers, which also managed to capture the deeper sides of the human heart.
But Past Lives has served as the emergence of one of modern cinema’s most promising writers and directors, a Korean-Canadian who possesses a deep understanding not only of emotional issues but actual writing too, which is surely the bread and butter of the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ Oscars. The film is perfectly paced, managing to skip entire dozen-year periods at a time, still capturing the growth that occurs during that time and retaining a narrative that one simply can’t look away from.
An extraordinary volume of tears was shed throughout Past Lives’ theatrical run and even more as it made its way into digital entertainment, a testament to Song’s prowess in delivering moments of painstaking emotive quality. Throw into the fact that Song’s debut glides effortlessly through its one-hour, 26-minute runtime, never faltering, and it suddenly becomes easy to see why Past Lives deserves to win ‘Best Original Screenplay’ this year.
