Blueprints: Emmy Nominees for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series

Full swing into Emmy season! Jorge looks at drama series first...

ICYMI: the nominations for the 70th Primetime Emmy Awards. 

Let’s take a look at the six shows that made the cut for Writing in a Drama Series. As in the Directing categories, writing categories highlight individual episodes rather than overall series, which makes it not uncommon for one show to have multiple nominations. However once "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men" were off the air, this category has not had any doubling up! This year every slot once again went to a different show, from newcomers, to established favorites, to people in their last round of eligibility.

Let's see the elevator pitches and the stats (we love a good round of statistics) after the jump... 

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Blueprints: "A Fantastic Woman"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge has been highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “T”, the last installment in this miniseries, he looks at the most recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film.

The LGBT experience encompasses all types of people, genders, nationalities, economic statuses, and every intersectionality in between. It doesn’t look one single way, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one, either. As the canon of queer cinema being to expand beyond one or two points of view, the ways in which film reflects this experience starts to get as diverse and colorful as the community itself.

So let’s take a look at A Fantastic Woman, the Oscar-winning Chilean film about a trans woman dealing with the loss of her partner, and the overwhelming grief and pressure that come with it. While it is a sobering portrait of a trans experience, it also effectively uses surreal imagery to portray the particular moments that Marina is going through. Let’s dive into two of them. 

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Blueprints: "Moonlight"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge has been highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “G”, he looks at the poetry in Moonlight. 

When La La Land took the Best Picture statue at the 2016 Oscars for about five minutes, it wasn’t an Earth shattering surprise. It was the kind of movie that wins Oscars. The twist, from a mixed up envelope, was the fact that a small independent film about queer people of color had actually managed to go above all the other nominees for the big trophy was what had made the Earth shatter.

Moonlight is not a traditional Best Picture winner, in everything from themes to distribution model to narrative structure to protagonist. It won three Oscars in total, including Best Adapted Screenplay. It is also not a traditional screenplay. Let’s see how the script transmitted emotion through descriptive lines...

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Blueprints: "The Kids Are All Right"

To celebrate Pride Month, every week of June Jorge will be highlighting the script of a movie that focuses on a different letter of the LGBT acronym. For “L”, he looks back at one of the most touching family dramas of the past decade.

For years, one of the biggest goals of the LGBT community (although certainly not the only or the most important one) has been to be seen as peers by the rest of the world. As people that, albeit in a different manner, go through the same experiences and have the same types of feelings: growing pains, heartbreak, the ache to share our lives with someone special…

On film, this sentiment of “We’re just like you” has been the most prevalent in family-focused narrative. The Kids Are All Right magnificently balances the act of showing a lesbian couple as readily familiar as any heterosexual marriage, while at the same time depicting struggles unique to them. Let’s take a look at a breaking point in the story; a moment where this harmony between a pleasant exterior and the turbulence of the couple is broken, and how it looks in the page. Via a single strand of bright red hair...

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Blueprints: "Iron Man"

To celebrate a decade of Marvel movies, Jorge goes back to the movie that started it all...

On May 2nd, the original Iron Man celebrated the 10th anniversary of its release. The film as the first official movie of Marvel Studios and the one that kick started and eventually allowed the completely transformed film landscape of today. It is now ten years, eighteen films, and a multibillion-dollar acquisition later.

So to celebrate (or condemn; whatever side of the argument you land in), let’s go back to the screenplay for the movie, and examine how scripts describe and develop action scenes; sequences that mostly rely on visual cues rather than description or dialogue...

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