The point of these two categories, though, is to signal that overlapping but distinct craft choices must be made in two different kinds of writing. The first involves inventing a story in a nonexistent world. The second involves reshaping and refashioning something existing into something new. That could involve translating between mediums with different formal conventions. Or it could mean finding a new way into the story entirely, illuminating it in a fresh way.

Obviously there’s a whole mess of tangly bits to deal with here, and entire fields of academic study, often deeply bound to their time and place, are devoted to hollering about what counts as adaptation. The Oscars will never be the place for snooty cinephiles like myself to exercise our theories and pet squabbles.

But there’s some caprice in all of this that might be fixed, a little, if only to help people like me sleep better at night (and filmmakers have a better sense of what they’ve just made). If the goal of the academy is to reward filmmakers for reaching new heights in their crafts, then pegging the categories to rules that respect their actual work is more in line with the aims than making them about I.P. Turning a true story into a movie requires adaptation, whether there’s one biography or a dozen involved. If the powers that be wish to preserve the odious sequel rule, treating individual characters’ existence as the litmus test, then fine. Just be consistent, and don’t try to tell me that Bayard Rustin was wholly invented by his screenwriter.

Will that mean changing the names of the categories? No, I don’t think so. Would that change the designation of “Barbie”? It wouldn’t. But it would make it all much cleaner.

There’s another way, of course, that would focus the categories more narrowly on the invention or adaptation of story beats. In that world, “Barbie” is original, and so is “Whiplash.” But “Maestro” becomes adapted; “Glass Onion” becomes original. And “Oppenheimer” probably stays where it is. The result of this, of course, would be to push all (or nearly all) movies based on true stories to the adapted category, leaving the original category for pure invention.

Would that be bad? I think not. It might remove incentive for the kind of boring soup-to-nuts biopics that used to show up a lot at the Oscars, though they’ve fallen off lately, and bring more inventive biographical films, like the ones we’ve been lucky enough to see this year, to the foreground. In other words, it would mean true innovation in the craft would be rewarded in the adapted category. And it might also inspire highly original and inventive sequels.

Who knows? Like everything else in show business, whacking one mole causes three more to pop up. But if the result is focusing the awards more on craft than on big corporate holdings, we’ll all be winners.

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