Best Original Screenplay

1. Stranger Than Fiction: It’s not just a wildly inventive and intensely wise story in itself, but explores our relationship to stories as tellers, listeners, and participants in them.

2. The Queen: Finding a surprising deeper meaning in what seemed like a moment of aberration, this is a profoundly powerful look at a time when paradigms shifted and all the rules changed.

3. Bobby: Manages to make its varied and sprawling cast of characters both warmly genuine and iconically symbolic at once, allowing us a glimpse at both the emotional and the intellectual appeal of a towering cultural memory.

4. Little Miss Sunshine: It skips blithely from raw emotional pain to outrageous oh-no-they-didn’t satire, and makes you realize, once more, that tears and laughter really do originate from the same deep-seated place.

5. Brick: Not many films can invent their own jargon and make it sound fresh, organic, and grounded in authenticity all at once -- this is a master class in itself in writing film dialogue.

Best Adapted Screenplay

1. Children of Men: Spare and lean, the script refuses to overexplicate what was, in the novel, a very internal conflict, letting external sociopolitical anxieties reveal personal ones.

2. The Departed: The Hong Kong original was reimagined from the ground up, and done so well you’d never guess this wasn’t a Boston story born and bred.

3. Thank You for Smoking: Transferring prose satire to a visual medium can be tough, but this film achieves it through the snarky elan of its charismatic antihero ... and his slick verbal sleazing.

4. Fast Food Nation: A nonfiction book is transformed into a fictional narrative in which the characters beautifully embody the imperative themes of the reality they represent.

5. V for Vendetta: It replaced the dated cultural chaos of the source graphic novel with up-to-the-nanosecond modernity but demonstrated that the unease both generate are similarly terrifying.

(Technorati tags: Best Original Screenplay, Best Adapted Screenplay)