I looove the Oscars. It’s the only awards show I watch. I love the dresses and the montages and the hosts’ lame attempts to be funny and the presenters’ cheesy dialogue and the sometimes-actually-moving winners’ speeches.

Beforehand, I read all the pre-ceremony coverage in Entertainment Weekly and People and other such publications. For years I’ve run the Oscar Pool at work. The night of the broadcast, I sit in a comfy chair with a blank Oscar Pool form in front of me and carefully note all the winners as they’re announced. From Best Supporting Actor to Best Sound Mixing, I applaud them all. And, as an editor of words, the “and the winner is” announcements that I am most interested in hearing are the ones for the writing awards—Best Original Screenplay and Best Adaptation.

Adaptation: that’s the watch-word for this essay.

A few years back, novelist Larry McMurty and his writing partner Diana Ossana won in the Adaptation category for their screenplay based on the short story “Brokeback Mountain.” I’m sure than many of you saw the movie (which should have won Best Picture, IMHO), but did you read the Underlying Intellectual Property? It is, as I said, a short story, by literary luminary Annie Proulx. It was originally published in the New Yorker, won  …