Oscar Winning Writers in the 1990s

Oscar Winning Writers was the Final Jeopardy category in the last game of 20x champ Julia Collins. There was a discussion about Julia’s chances of knowing the answer based on the NY Times Clue of the Day before the game aired, and one thing that was brought up was that she was a teenager at the time this 1999 movie came out, about 16. The book it was based on was published over a decade before that. Anyway, enough excuses. The point is, if you are in your 20s or 30s when you go on Jeopardy!, how many questions in categories like movies, actors, actress, film awards, etc., are you going to miss because they were before your time?

You can’t possibly learn everything, can you? –and remember the year on top of that! How many of these Oscar Winning Writers do you know just from the 1990s (and don’t count John Irving unless you got that right when you watched Jeopardy! on 6/2/14!):

Adapted (the work it is adapted from in parentheses):
1990 – Dances With Wolves – Michael Blake (1988 novel, same name, same author)
1991 – The Silence Of The Lambs – Ted Tally (1988 novel, same name by Thomas Harris)
1992 – Howards End – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1910 novel, same name by E.M. Forster)
1993 – Schindler’s List – Steven Zaillian (1982 novel, Schindler Ark by Thomas Keneally)
1994 – Forrest Gump – Eric Roth (1986 novel, same name by Winston Groom)
1995 – Sense And Sensibility – Emma Thompson (1811 novel, same name by Jane Austen)
1996 – Sling Blade – Billy Bob Thornton (1994 short film They Call it a Sling Blade by Billy Bob Thornton)
1997 – L.A. Confidential – Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson (1990 novel, same name by James Ellroy)
1998 – Gods And Monsters – Bill Condon (1995 novel, Father of Frankenstein by Christopher Bram)
1999 – The Cider House Rules – John Irving (1985 novel, same name, same author)

And there are Oscars for Original Screenplays every year:
1990 – Ghost – Bruce Joel Rubin
1991 – Thelma and Louise – Callie Khouri
1992 – The Crying Game – Neil Jordan
1993 – The Piano – Jane Campion
1994 – Pulp Fiction – Quentin Tarantino (screenplay, story), Roger Avary (story)
1995 – The Usual Suspects – Christopher McQuarrie
1996 – Fargo – Joel and Ethan Coen
1997 – Good Will Hunting – Ben Affleck and Matt Damon
1998 – Shakespeare in Love – Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard
1999 – American Beauty – Alan Ball

There are so many different ways to present information sets. Remember that for each winner above, there were 4 also rans. Since all’s fair in love, war and Jeopardy!, they could give you a clue based on one of the movies that lost… or you could study and memorize all that and more and, bummer of bummers, not get a single clue in the Oscar category.

Here’s a site where you can see many more books that films were based that you may or may not have read. (That list is not limited to the 90s, but Cider House Rules is on there).