It was a bookish Oscars ceremony this year, with three of the five films nominated for best picture at this year's Academy Awards being based on novels.
No Country for Old Men, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy (Pan Macmillan), won the coveted best picture category, as well as awards for best direction (Joel and Ethan Coen), best supporting actor (Javier Bardem) and best adapted screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen).
The other films nominated in the best adapted screenplay section were Atonement, based on the novel by Ian McKewan (Vintage), There Will Be Blood, based on the novel Oil by Upton Sinclair (Penguin), Away From Her, based on the short story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain' from Hatred, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (Vintage), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Jean-Dominique Bauby, HarperCollins).
Other films based on books that received nominations in various categories this year were The Bourne Ultimatum, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum (Orion), The Golden Compass, based on Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (Scholastic), Into the Wild, based on the biography by Jon Krakauer (Pan), The Kite Runner, based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini (Bloomsbury), and Beaufort, based on the novel by Ron Leshem (Harvill Secker).
This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker
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