‘The Kids Are All Right” Screenwriter's Uncoolnees Rewarded With Oscar Nomination

So if you’re “The Kids Are All Right” co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg, do you play it chill on the morning of Academy Awards nominations and wait for the phone to ring with some welcome news?

“My morning was that I tried to sleep through it to act cool and could not,” Blumberg told PopcornBiz just two hours after being nominated in the Original Screenplay category with co-writer and director Lisa Cholodenko. “I kept waking up, so I finally admitted that I cared. I got up and I watched it live on IMDB.”

“It really was surreal,” Blumberg admitted of hearing the film’s four Oscar noms announced (Best Picture, Annette Bening for Best Actress, Mark Ruffalo for Best Supporting Actor and his shared writing nod). “Thank God we didn’t think about a day like this, because we just spent so many days, so many months in front of that computer screen just trying to make this the best possible script, and then spent years trying to make it the best possible movie. It’s crazy that that actually paid off, and I guess that it did.”

The screenwriter said that the film’s nominations “mean that people in our profession, our chosen line of work, have watched this movie and have seen something that they believe to be of substance and of merit and of lasting value, and that’s an incredibly rewarding thing – to be honored by your peers who know how hard it is to get a movie made, let alone a movie that has something to say.”

Blumberg and Cholodenko toiled for years on the project, and he said that once filmed, one scene in particular blew away their expectations beyond what they’d put on the page: “The dinner scene with Annette Bening singing the Joni Mitchell song. We had an amazing time writing that scene, laughing and crying while writing it. And then when we saw it actually realized it was better than we ever hoped it could be. It was truly a fulfilling artistic experience.”

And of course, he’s already made a momentous decision about Oscar night: to rent or to purchase formal wear. “I splurged and I bought a tux,” he admitted.

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