Oscar Blitz 2025 – Original Screenplay (VIDEO)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved a good story. Whether it was a bedtime story my mom made up, a book, or even a piece of well-written news copy, I am enchanted by a tale told well. I didn’t really know how to express myself when I was younger, as I couldn’t draw, and I wasn’t all that good at telling jokes. I could make shit up, however, which was alternately a blessing and a curse depending on the situation. When it came to reading comprehension and writing assignments, I knew what I was doing, and occasionally I even came up with something interesting for my age. At the same time, if I ever got in trouble, there was always this unspoken accusation hanging in the air that I was just lying to save myself. Eventually I got into acting and music as my go-to outlets, but stories were always a part of my development.

By the time I got to college, I had to figure out exactly how I wanted to chart my education. I was studying TV and Film, but I didn’t exactly have a direction for it all. I found out I was alright at editing, and I liked doing sports and sketch comedy, but that didn’t immediately translate into a career path, much less a course plan for my upperclassmen years. In my sophomore year, the first full production class I took involved making student films in small groups, and by happenstance it worked out that I was part of a trio that essentially rotated direction, editing, and writing duties on each project.

Junior year was the inflection point. I had to take a writing class of some kind within my major (there were two outside writing classes required as well, but I got credit for those with my AP test scores), be it copywriting for advertising, press releases, technical writing, or screenwriting. I’d never tried to write a real script before, so I figured, why not? The class was being taught by my favorite professor, so I knew it’d at least be fun, and I gave it a shot.

That was the moment that changed everything.

Oh god, could that have been more cliché? Anyway, there were about 20 of us in the class, and the whole semester was spent writing a feature-length first draft. I made a teen dramedy farce very loosely based on my freshman year of high school, having moved to an entirely new state the summer before. As I developed my characters, wrote my dialogue, and figured out my actions, I found myself obsessed with getting as much right on the first try as possible, to the point where my other classes kind of suffered. I still did okay, but as I fell more in love with the process, I found myself caring less and less about everything else. I had two minors that I had to finish, and a few other required courses, but as far as I was concerned, I had found my way. I was going to be a writer, preferably screenplays.

That decision affected every choice I made for the rest of my school life. I did a summer abroad to learn about Irish theatre, which included an independent study course in addition to the classroom aspect, so I took the knowledge from that experience and wrote the first act of my own Irish-style stage play. The following fall I took two separate comedy writing classes, one for creating a spec script for a sitcom, and the other in producing a full TV pilot. When it came time for my thesis, the only choice was the Master Screenwriting discipline, also taught by the same professor, who by that point had become my unofficial mentor. He actually encouraged me to try something else so that I wouldn’t feel like I missed out by being too focused on this one element, but I assured him that this was what I wanted to do. Also, because I hadn’t taken the prerequisites for the other thesis classes, I was kind of stuck.

That final semester I wrote a parody of baseball movies, similar in spirit to all the Scary Movie films and various genre knockoffs that became a thing for the next decade. I got some professional advice and feedback, particularly from two alumni, Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi, who were successful in their own rights, having created Pete & Pete for Nickelodeon and written the kiddie comedy Snow Day (which began as a Pete & Pete film before the show ended and the script got shelved and retooled years later), and they were but a few years from their biggest box office win, the first Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. They gave me two big ego boosts. They noted that the baseball script was by far the most commercial they had seen from my class, meaning that if I worked hard and got an agent, I’d be able to get high-paying work, even if the ideas aren’t always great (and to be clear, they thought my bits were funny, saying it reminded them of Spaceballs, which was the exact style of silly I was going for). Better yet, they wanted to know more about the teen script from the year before, as the professor had told them about it, and they thought it had a real Pete & Pete vibe to it. Had I been able to move to Los Angeles straight after graduation, they had offered to help me workshop it and try to get it sold. Alas, that wasn’t meant to be (and the days of writers being able to sell unsolicited scripts are long gone), but it let me know that I had potential and value in this work, rather than just doing it as a bit of fun. I could make this my job.

One of the last pieces of encouragement my professor gave me, one he gave to all of us, was to write something every day. It doesn’t matter what. It could be a journal entry, a script, a short story, or just an email. As long as you keep your fingers going, either with a pen or a keyboard, this is a skill you’ll never lose. I think about that a lot, and I took it to heart. I don’t think a day has gone by where I haven’t put down some idea, whether it’s for work, this years-long blogging hobby, or just some random bullshit. And I became a professional writer. My forte is game shows rather than scripts, but the itch is still there, and I’d love the chance to do one for real.

Because the sad thing is, post-graduation, I’ve maybe revised those two screenplays about three times total, and I’ve only attempted a new script once, about 15 years ago. I have an idea in mind for the next one I’d like to try, but I haven’t been able to truly sit down and live in that mode again, where dialogue, character, and action just flow from my fingertips.

It’s also why I tend to enjoy the Original Screenplay category more than Adapted. It’s not a matter of quality, just that zen feeling when you come up with your own thought and find a way to translate it to the page. That’s not to say that those adapting other works don’t get into that same zone, it’s just that I’ve never really had the chance to give it a proper go and see if the experiences feel the same. Even when I’m writing something completely different, like a short story or a movie review, I know that what I’m putting down is wholly my own. Some outside force might be the catalyst, but the words are mine, and that’s an incredible feeling.

Okay, enough with the schmaltz, on to business. Time to wrap up Week 2 of the 2025 Blitz.

This year’s nominees for Original Screenplay are… in the video below!

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One more small anecdote. As I learned in that first screenwriting class, page translates to screen fairly literally when it comes to the actual content. For a film script, every page is essentially a minute of the actual movie. For TV scripts, it’s about a 1.5:1 ratio of page to time. The professor warned us that the task would be daunting to write a full feature-length script, but it wasn’t until I had to copy and paste 110 pages from Final Draft (the most well-known scripting software) to a Word document so that I could print it out using the school’s machines (I didn’t have my own printer until I moved to Connecticut two years later) that I truly felt the weight of it, figuratively and literally. I had to print three copies each of those suckers. They weighed a ton. I’ve tried my hand at writing a novel a couple of times over the years, but I never finished them. I can only imagine how thick those manuscripts would be if I ever did. Then I think of The Brutalist, and wince on behalf of Brady Corbet’s back.

My Rankings:
Are in the video.

Who do you think should win? Vote now in the poll below!

Up next, the Blitz is off for the next two days, which means it’s time to clear more off the backlog! Tomorrow the plan is to do the second installment of my “Back Row Thoughts” series going over the Documentary Feature shortlist, and then on Sunday, it’ll be a solo review for Armand, Norway’s International Feature entry, which even though it was not nominated, did get released domestically on schedule, and I was able to take it in today. Then on Monday, the Blitz is back with the category that will have me thankful that it’s in print, as my voice will ironically be incredibly hoarse from screaming at the Super Bowl the night before. It’s Sound!

And oh yeah…

FLY EAGLES FLY!

Join the conversation in the comments below! How much is writing a part of your life? Have you ever tried to create your own script? Do you value story or dialogue more when judging screenplays? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!