When people think in terms of voting in this category, they think of screenplays they like, and if it’s an original screenplay, they vote for it in the original category, and if it’s an adapted screenplay, they vote for it in the adapted category.

What doesn’t occur to people — and even if it does, who has the time to follow through? — is to examine what precisely was adapted, in order to assess, not just the final product, but the nature of the difficulty and of the creative transformation required to produce that product.

I’m thinking in particular now of Erin Cressida Wilson’s screenplay for CHLOE, which was based on the French film, NATHALIE. NATHALIE plays like a sort of prenatal CHLOE. Everything that’s in CHLOE, Wilson discovered in latent or dormant form in the original work — but I do mean dormant as in not active, just there as a possibility. She took a limp and to some degree pointless screenplay and made sense of it dramatically, emotionally and logically. She is why CHLOE is a much, much better movie than NATHALIE.

But no one has seen NATHALIE, and if I tell you that CHLOE is good and NATHALIE is not so great, it doesn’t make you want to invest two hours to see NATHALIE just to find out what you think — you wouldn’t do that, even if you were an Academy voter, especially with a pile of 50 or 60 DVDs to blast through between now and whenever they’re voting. Hence, this work is almost guaranteed to be ignored.

If there’s good news in this, it’s that the likely winner in this category will be Aaron Sorkin anyway, for THE SOCIAL NETWORK, and he’ll deserve it.