‘A Real Pain’ is a real spoiler to break a 20-year Oscar streak

The Best Original Screenplay Oscar race has become a pain — and it could become A Real Pain’s. If it does, the film will become the first screenplay winner in either category not to hail from a Best Picture nominee in 20 years.

2024’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the last original screenplay champ that was not up for Best Picture. In adapted, it goes back further to 1998’s Gods and Monsters. Both of these occurred when Best Picture was a field of five. In the preferential ballot era, all 30 original and adapted screenplay winners thus far have been Best Picture nominees.

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That does not bode well for A Real Pain, which failed to make the Best Picture lineup of 10. But Jesse Eisenberg’s script has refused to go away. It has pocketed the second-most awards in the category this season after Sean Baker’s Anora and won Best Original Screenplay at Sunday’s BAFTA Awards, adding another twist to a category that most had assumed early on was locked up for Anora. A Real Pain was in third place in Gold Derby’s BAFTA odds, behind Anora and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and is even lower in the Oscar odds, in fourth place (The Brutalist is in third there).

A Real Pain’s underestimation is no doubt because of its lack of a Best Picture nomination — it didn’t even make the BAFTA longlist for Best Picture. But Anora has not proven to be the dominant frontrunner in the category everyone thought it would be, leaving daylight for an upset. For a whole month after Anora‘s shutout at the Golden Globes — where the group’s single screenplay award went to adapted favorite Conclave — and before its Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America Awards windfall, Anora was only predicted to win original screenplay at the Oscars. Now? It might be its shakiest above-the-line category, especially after Mikey Madison took Best Actress at BAFTA. The Neon film has struggled to win the major screenplay prizes. Besides its Globe and BAFTA losses, it fell to The Substance at Critics Choice. It triumphed at Saturday’s Writers Guild of America Awards, defeating A Real Pain, but numerous scripts, including The Substance, were ineligible.

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So for those keeping track: Anora has won an industry award and beaten A Real Pain but not The Substance. A Real Pain has won an industry award and beaten both Anora and The Substance. The Substance has won a non-industry award and beaten Anora and A Real Pain. The safest play is to stick with Anora for the Oscar. It’s the PGA, DGA, and WGA champ, and the Best Picture frontrunner. Twelve years ago, there was a similar triple split in adapted — Argo won WGA, Lincoln won Critics Choice, and Silver Linings Playbook won BAFTA (the Globes awarded original contender Django Unchained) — and the Oscar went to Best Picture winner Argo. All of those films were Best Picture nominees.

Had A Real Pain made Best Picture, it would definitely be taken more seriously in original screenplay. But are we all taking the Best Picture stat too seriously? Stats show trends, but they’re not unbreakable laws, and every race is different. More so than Anora and The Substance, A Real Pain is a very dialogue-heavy and economical script. The Searchlight film also likely finished in 11th in Best Picture, given its BAFTA screenplay victory, PGA nomination, and Kieran Culkin’s utter domination of the supporting actor race. It converted both of its BAFTA nominations into wins, an impressive feat, and is on the precipice of doing the same at the Oscars. Culkin himself would snap a Best Picture-related streak with an Oscar triumph: He’ll be the first supporting actor winner not hail from a Best Picture nominee since Christopher Plummer (Beginners) 13 years ago. The Best Picture stat was used against Brendan Fraser in Best Actor two years ago as The Whale missed the top category, but he prevailed, the first since Jeff Bridges (2009’s Crazy Heart) to win the award without a corresponding Best Picture nomination. Twenty years is a longer streak, but streaks do come to an end at some point under the right circumstances.

Maybe that’s what A Real Pain was put here to do: cause real pain to our beloved Oscar stats.

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