In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?

Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.

Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.

The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.

Here’s the thing: according to the guild, “Barbie” is an original screenplay, but the academy disagreed. The academy also reclassified “Origin,” which didn’t receive a nomination but is an interesting case in this argument. Ava DuVernay crafted a screenplay that’s sort of based on Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book “Caste,” but is also a movie about Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) researching and writing “Caste.” It’s a nesting doll of a screenplay, and the guild deemed it an original, presumably because the screenplay has a narrative the book lacks. The academy begged to differ. (An even more extreme example is Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for “Adaptation,” a movie about a man named Charlie Kaufman adapting Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief,” and which was brain-twistingly categorized as adapted at the 2003 Oscars. It lost, to “The Pianist.”)