It Should Have Been Nominated!: ‘The Breakfast Club’ ~ Digital Library

It’s hard to quantify what makes for a great screenplay. Oftentimes a script being credited as good by a viewer or critic tends to reduce to good dialogue, which is certainly vital, but not by any means the entirety of the function a script serves.

The reality is that scripts are malleable by nature. From pre-production rewrites, to on-set rewrites, to improvisation on the part of the actors, oftentimes the only way to say for sure if a script is good is to read it for yourself.

We live in something of a golden era of script accessibility thanks to the internet. If you want to see the blueprint for a movie you love, you can probably download it with minimal Google searching. And if you want physical copies of some of the all-time great scripts like When Harry Met Sally or Pulp Fiction, your local bookstore probably has them in stock. It’s a great way to see what a movie you love is built from – or to see what changed between the film being written and its filming.

Back in 1985, a movie featuring one of the best scripts of all time was released to great acclaim. It remains one of the all-time great high school movies and has resonated across generations, often feeling as fresh to new viewers as it did upon its release over 30 years ago. That movie is The Breakfast Club, written and directed by John Hughes. It did not receive any Oscar nominations and that is a federal crime.

The Academy Awards were in pretty sad shape in the 80s. That decade saw the boom of the Oscar Movie, stuffy films often reeking of self-importance made in the interest of generating awards season buzz. Movies like Amadeus, Gandhi, and Out of Africa (the 1985 film that took home Best Picture at the Oscars in 1986) aren’t without merit but have largely aged poorly. The Academy’s adoration for movies like these led to a ton of films that have gone on to become iconic, influential pieces of cinema getting the shaft at the actual awards ceremony.

It Should Have Been Nominated For: Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Look, let’s start with the dialogue. The Breakfast Club remains an all-time quotable movie, from quips like “Does Barry Manilow know that you raid his wardrobe?” to “Screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place,” to one of the story’s scathing thesis statements: “When you grow up, your heart dies.” It’s recognizable as a great screenplay before you’ve even read a page of it because of how much story and character is conveyed successfully through dialogue.

It’s vital as this is, after all, basically a plotless movie. A group of kids show up to Saturday morning detention and pretty much just talk. Sometimes there’s a sidequest of sorts. That’s a notable accomplishment in and of itself, though – it’s hard to pull off a hangout movie. Telling a story that’s as infinitely rewatchable and engaging as this one without having many stories to begin with is no small feat, and pulling it off this well certainly warrants at least a nomination.

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

But most notably, it’s a script rooted in empathy. Every element of the film works towards this but it all starts with the script, which at every turn works to empathize with a generation that often finds itself, in fiction, pandered to at best and slighted at worst. An attempt to treat that subject matter with respect would be admirable enough. That it succeeds in a way that few films since have managed to do is a reminder of how powerful a storytelling medium film can be.

Its omission from this category is all the more notable when you look at what did secure a nomination that year. The nominees included winner Witness, Back to the Future, Brazil, The Official Story, and Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. Back to the Future’s nomination is pretty indisputable and if anything it should have received a couple more nominations that year.

Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

Brazil is the kind of weird, singular vision that so rarely receives awards acclaim that it getting a nomination feels like a win in and of itself. It’s when we get to the remaining three that it gets a bit dicier. The Official Story may not be regarded as a must-see movie today, but at the time, it was a genuine revelation – and an important movie, given its subject matter and the fact that as an Argentinian film it spoke to political unrest in its native country. Witness is hardly an all-time great thriller, but it remains a deeply watchable movie with a solid screenplay.

That leaves The Purple Rose of Cairo. Given what we know about Allen as a person today, it’s hard to take issue with taking away any and every Oscar win and nomination he ever received. But even stepping away from that, it’s a film that hardly stands out as his best today. Plus, it’s taking very little away from him in the grand scheme of things – he has plenty of other wins and nominations. Nominate The Breakfast Club in its place.

But we’re taking it one step further – The Breakfast Club should also win. It’s an important movie with an important script. Back to the Future may dwarf it when it comes to iconography and you could certainly argue for the resonance of The Official Story, but The Breakfast Club wins on the merit of its script being the most notable facet of its craft. Its success begins and ends with the screenplay Hughes wrote – and the man never actually won an Oscar, despite being one of the more acclaimed populist filmmakers of all time. It feels only right that he’d win one for his masterpiece.

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