Book Adaptations & Best Picture Nominations: Trend Revisited

In the 10 year period between 1997 and 2006 only 32% of Oscar Best Picture nominees came from films adapted from novels, and only 20% of winning films. By mid-2007 I had begun writing off the book-adaptation as a viable best picture front-runner, especially as the 2005 & 2006 ceremonies had no best picture nominees that came from adapted fiction.

2007 Fiction-based Films: Best Picture Nominees
Despite the lack of fiction-love by the academy in the 2 previous years, last years 2008 ceremony was a little different with 3 of the 5 nominees coming from adapted fiction.

• Oscar winner No Country for Old Men was based on the book by Cormac McCarthy


• Atonement was based on the book by Ian McEwan


• There Will Be Blood was based on Oil! a novel by Upton Sinclair

(The other two nominated films Michael Clayton and Juno were written directly for screen, bucking a previous trend of historical films making the final cut, as all 5 nominees were pure fiction)

2008 Fiction-based Films: Best Picture Nominees
2009's nominated films similarly had 3 of the 5 nominations coming from adapted fiction...and then 2 historical/biography films (Milk, and Frost/Nixon).

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was adapted from an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story


• Slumdog Millionaire was adapted from the novel Q & A written by Vikas Swarup


• The Reader was adapted by the book by Bernhard Schlink

This changes the stats, with now, 40% of best picture nominees over the past 10 year being adapted from fiction.

And the trend over the past two years is even higher than that figure.

2009 Fiction-based Films
As 2008's film season is wrapping up, it makes us curious as to what books we might want to include on our reading list as we look to potential best picture nominees for 2009 films that come from adapted fiction sources. I've tried my best to create a complete list of books that have film adaptations scheduled or in pre-production for 2009.

• Sundance film winner Push from the novel Push by Sapphire


• Stephen Daldry's forever postponed project adapting Pulitzer winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon


• Stephen Frears' Michelle Pfieffer vehicle Cheri by Colette


• Natalie Portman will star in 17 Photos of Isabel based on Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman


• Martin Scorsese brings another Lahane crime thriller to screen with an adaptation of Dennis Lahane's Shutter Island


• The awaited adaptation of The Road by Cormac McCarthy


• The Lodger A reprise of an adaptation that inspired the 1927 Alfred Hitchcock thriller with the same title based on The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes and Phillip J. Morledge
  
• The much anticipated Peter Jackson film adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones


• George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Daniels and Kevin Spacey all star in the adaptation of The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson


• A couple animated classic books, Wes Anderson's animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Spike Jonze anticipated adaption of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak


• Jason Reitman Juno-follow up Up in the Air by Walter Kirn


• Whale Rider's director and star reunited in the adaptation of The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox


• The American Psycho follow up that premiered at Sundance is the film adaptation of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis


• Billy Bob Thornton is set to star in the adaptation of Peace Like a River by Leif Enger


• There's also the film called 2081 based on the short story Harrison Bergeron from Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection Welcome To The Monkey House


• Futuristic story The Repossession Mambo by Eric Garcia is coming to screens 2009 the same year the book, yet to be released, book comes out


• DaVinci Code Followup directed again by Ron Howard is the adaption of Angels & Demons by Dan Brown


• Rebecca Miller will direct her own book The Private Lives of Pippa Lee: A Novel


• The frequently adapted Stephen King will have his books Bag of Bones, Dolan's Cadillac (from Nightmares and Dreamscapes), Cell (Eli Roth directing), and From a Buick 8
  
• Gael Garcia Bernal will star in the adaptation of Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
  
  
• Daniel Craig's Tailor in the James Bond films Tom Ford is directing an adaption of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man


• 2009 brings Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Twillight sequel Stephanie Meyer's New Moon
  
• And the list would feel incomplete with out mentioning the film adaptation of Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
  

Anyone willing to predict, which, if any, of these based-on-fiction films will be apart of Award season a year from now?

Which one's are you going to track down and read before they hit the theater?

Are then any I'm forgetting?