Insofar as the Twilight franchise has yet to see Oscar love, the Best Screenplay from an Adaptation from another medium might be Meyer’s ticket to the Academy Awards. There can be only one other film franchise about fantasy characters stemming from the books, Lord of the Rings, and artisans in New Zealand are still building shelves to house all that Peter Jackson hardware.
Academy voters are a notoriously Brokeback-shy crowd, so good clean fun like the Nosfaraten of Forks might prove worthy. Of all the Oscar categories, Best Screenplay Adaptation might be the Twilight saga’s entree into ‘Oscar” statuette club seats.
Does Summit have what it takes to launch an effective Golden Globe campaign or Oscar volley for Twilight? The last time a pop movie underdog favorite landed in Academy territory, The Matrix won 4 Oscars, for the industrial and film arts and tech awards. In the great scheme of things, Editing and Sound matter.
Does New Moon and its wolfish features of CGI rank among Transformers and Star Trek, the no doubt leading contenders of the year? That would be a pie in the face for Universal, whose F/X heavy Underworld series chomps box office and scores with fans but not Academy voters. And scribe vamp Meyer could name her own genre for the next series of books she writes.