Throughout the Hulu series Pam & Tommy, Pamela Anderson spends a lot of time as the only woman among crowds of men. A table full of male lawyers press her into a lawsuit that devastates her public image. More lawyers subject her to a brutally misogynistic deposition. Television affiliates gather around her like a magazine cover come to life. And of course, her Baywatch producers surround her on the beach, cutting any meaningful acting from her script and posing her as a literal object for the camera. “I can move myself,” Lily James’s Anderson uncomfortably reminds a crewman when he attempts to physically reposition her.

The series, which just aired a devastating sixth episode and concludes on March 8, shows audiences a version of Pamela Anderson many haven’t had the chance to see before. She’s not just a blonde bombshell finding her path as a sex symbol. Pam & Tommy’s Anderson is a self-possessed, ambitious woman whose instincts and intelligence should prevail over the boardrooms of men—if only so much of her existence weren’t about pleasing people.

There’s a painful irony then, that a show about Anderson’s victimhood came about against her wishes and from a largely male production team. (Pam & Tommy was initially announced in 2018 with James Franco directing and starring as Tommy Lee. He left the project after accusations from female students of his acting school.)

The show tells the backstory to the infamous sex tape of newlyweds Anderson and Lee. Stolen and sold on the web, it arguably marked both the first viral celebrity sex tape and the first revenge porn of the digital era. Set in the Wild West days of the early internet, Pam & Tommy chronicles how the tape opened up questions of celebrity and privacy that we still grapple with today.

Without Anderson’s approval though, does Pam & Tommy just repeat the exploitation it depicts? Recent works such as Framing Britney Spears and American Crime Story: Impeachment also retell a chapter of ’90s tabloid scandal. The show’s eponymous tape entered the world at a moment that lacked a moral framework for the technology enabling its spread. Are we similarly at a moment where retelling personal histories—even those of celebrities—should be more sensitive to their subjects’ privacy?

Three staff writers for The Atlantic debate that question and break down Pam & Tommy on an episode of The Review, the magazine’s culture podcast. Listen to Sophie Gilbert, Shirley Li, and Spencer Kornhaber here:

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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Sophie Gilbert: We are here today to discuss Pam & Tommy, the Hulu miniseries. It tells the story of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous sex tape and stars Lily James and Sebastian Stan as the celebrity couple and Seth Rogen as the disgruntled contractor who sells the stolen tape on the internet. Pam & Tommy is obviously based on a true story, loosely but fairly on a magazine story in Rolling Stone that came out in 2014 that focused on Rand Gauthier, the character that Seth Rogen plays. He is the disgruntled contractor whom Tommy Lee stiffed on a job and forced off his property with a shotgun to the face. Rand decided to get his revenge and steal the safe from the couple’s property that turned out to contain a tape.

It led to the first instance of a celebrity sex tape really going viral. When I was writing about the series, I thought about it as the first real instance of revenge porn in mainstream American culture. And so it’s an interesting topic to consider now in this moment of 1990s/2000s revisionism, where we’re thinking about the stars whom we did wrong at the time and weren’t sensitive to. But of course, Pam & Tommy comes with an asterisk, which is that it has not been made with Pamela Anderson’s approval. She ignored all efforts from the cast and crew to reach out to her during the process, and has said that she really sort of resents the existence of this series that digs into a moment in her life that she felt was very humiliating and punishing and sort of obviously a gross invasion of her privacy. So this show comes with a lot of factors to consider, but I wanted to ask before we get into that context: What did you make of it purely as a work of entertainment?

Shirley Li: Whenever I see a TV show that’s inherently buzzy because of its subject—that’s not necessarily recognizable [intellectual property] but a recognizable scandal playing the role of recognizable IP—I want it to make the case for it being a series. And the first couple of episodes seemed to point in a direction that this would not be a show that’s full of bloat. And it starts petering out for me by the end. But I’m curious what Spencer thinks.

Spencer Kornhaber: I have to say: I enjoyed it. I went into it with similar reservations about this crop of shows and movies over the past decade that have kind of straightforwardly tried to re-create scandals from history and teach us something about them but end up feeling like rehashes or too in the weeds, or even distorting reality in the attempt to entertain.

Gilbert: What are some examples that come to mind?

Kornhaber: I mean, the People v. O. J. Simpson series by Ryan Murphy comes to mind, as does the whole American Crime Story franchise by him. We just did a House of Gucci podcast, and I had my problems with it. The Crown is in this genre.

Li: Other Craig Gillespie work like I, Tonya—that was a film that didn’t come with the asterisk that Sophie mentioned at the top because Tonya Harding was fully on board with having her side of the story told in a film adaptation. But that too was another retelling of a tabloid scandal.

Kornhaber: Yeah, I was concerned that Pam & Tommy would just be the Wikipedia entry, but the show is fun and weirdly lovable in many parts. You do want to know what happens and you do care about these characters. Reading the original Rolling Stone story this was based on, it’s actually pretty true to what happened. Some things changed, but generally in the direction of making Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee a little more sympathetic. It felt like it was walking on this tight wire the whole time. I kept expecting it to fall off and it never quite did.

Gilbert: One of the things I really did appreciate about the show is it’s useful as a guide to how the internet went wrong. It’s set in 1995 and 1996, the earliest days when you still had dial-up modems. And you get to see the first days of the internet as this Wild West where anything could happen and anything could be sold. All the rules that applied to ordinary life—legal injunctions and copyright laws and privacy laws—didn’t exist on this new frontier. It blew everything up. It blew up privacy. It blew up celebrity culture. It blew up porn. All in ways that I think we’re still struggling to deal with.

Kornhaber: It starts from a very simple thing, which is the sex tape. It seems like a just salacious story, but it really does follow these threads about privacy and celebrity culture, but also what it meant for the actual people involved.

[Read: Pam & Tommy and the curse of the '90s bombshell]

Li: The show does really reconsider Pamela Anderson as a character. But it also starts with a zippy I, Tonya energy from Gillespie. And when it gets to Anderson’s background and the reconsideration of her, the two elements did not marry into a cohesive show for me.

It’s telling the feminist branch of the story instead of showing it, whereas the internet-culture story is fascinating because it’s really showing there. The scandal hurt Pamela’s reputation more than Tommy’s because of her gender, and the show asks her to be the person telling the audience these things. And I wish it didn’t treat her and Taylor Schilling’s character as mouthpieces to get these moments in. They feel like sprinkles, as if someone forgot to fully bake them in.

Gilbert: Yeah, I wrote in my review about how, because Pam comes to represent so many things—including all the terrible things that happen to women on the internet—you kind of lose a sense of who she is. Even me calling her “Pam”—that’s not her name. That’s the tabloid nickname for her. You lose a sense of who she is that I think maybe would have been more present if she had been on board.

That said, who gets to tell whose story is something we haven’t necessarily figured out. Monica Lewinsky was an executive producer on the recent season of American Crime Story: Impeachment, which focused largely on her, to the detriment of the show. I think it actually would have been a better, more compelling show if it had focused more on the Clintons and less on Monica. Maybe that’s a terrible anti-feminist thing to say, but that was how I felt watching it.

Li: I agree, Sophie. We haven’t figured out this question. We haven’t figured out the right way to make these shows in a way that yields a product that doesn’t, while you’re watching it, remind you of whatever happened behind the scenes. I couldn’t finish Impeachment, first because I didn’t enjoy watching the destruction of Monica Lewinsky, but there was also this nagging idea of, Is this the full story or am I watching something dishonest?

And I think, as Pam & Tommy went on, that question came back but from the other direction: Is there a point to watching this if I know Pamela Anderson didn’t have a say in any of this? I don’t know what the solution is. In the case of I, Tonya, the screenwriter said he fact-checked everything in that film with Tonya Harding. It’s called I, Tonya, not I, Nancy, so he didn’t go to Nancy and check everything from her end. Tonya signed off on her truth and Jeff Gillooly signed off on his, so his screenplay is everything that they believe and the audience can take away whatever they believe from it. And that’s a mixed bag that I guess clears everyone, but I don’t know if it does either.

Gilbert: Memory is so fallible. Personal narrative is not always trustworthy. Everyone has their own agenda. And so I think there is a huge gap in Pam & Tommy without having Pamela Anderson’s approval that is hard to get past. But at the same time, it’s really hard to know what to do with these kinds of stories if the people that they are about don’t want them to be told. It’s like those early days of the internet: We haven’t figured out a moral framework for this entirely.

Kornhaber: Right, we can’t live in a world where we can’t make movies about famous people without their approval. We have to start from that.

Gilbert: But also: Is it the right thing to do, necessarily?

Kornhaber: Yeah, absolutely. And then you enter questions of: What are you doing with that story? Are you just replicating it? Are we basically just watching the sex tape again? She objected to it being put out there, and it’s basically another act of titillation.

With this show though, I think the answer is no. It’s straining to make all of these points about what happened and put it in a greater context. It may not completely succeed at that, but it really changed my perception of Pamela Anderson. I don’t know a lot about her or about this story. Even the fact that they didn’t intentionally leak the sex tape is a very basic fact that now, pop culture can really believe. They’ve said it all these years, but this show can really define that as fact in people’s minds.

And whatever it’s doing with her character, it’s making her seem sweet and smart and ambitious, and it’s driving at how absolutely painful it was to have this happen to her. And it’s pretty astute about the reasons why it was painful. Maybe she was somewhat ashamed of this footage coming out, but she’s more aware of how it’s going to damage her career and how people see her when she walks down the street. It’s a really wrenching thing to see. And she may feel like it’s condescending or turning her into a symbol of something she doesn’t want to be a symbol of—and I hope she speaks her piece on that—but it was helpful to me. When I’m watching the show, I think they want to do right by her.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Li: I do appreciate the show’s intentions. It does do a good job of simply showing the job of being a celebrity like Pamela Anderson. You can see in Lily James’s performance the sheer exhaustion of having to sell yourself and your image. She’s constantly defending her worth.

Gilbert: Watching her on the Baywatch set with the male producers and directors all standing around, every time she walks up to ask them about her monologue, they just stare at her cleavage. And then I remember that this was a show that I watched as a child, that 15 million people watched in England. It was on Saturday nights and little kids would get together and watch the show that was basically hot people in swimsuits running. You really sense in the show how crazy Hollywood was in that era and how this sweet woman just wants to do her monologue. She just wants to act. Just wants to be appreciated for being more than a sex symbol, while she also doesn’t reject the idea of being a sex symbol whatsoever. In the third episode, she has that amazing speech with her publicist about Jane Fonda and all the multitudes that she contains. And you believe she’s capable of being more, but no one will give her the opportunity.

Kornhaber: It is getting at this question of, “What are we going to allow our bombshell female celebrities to do as they mature and want to do different things in their career?” It makes me think of our girl Kim Kardashian, who is probably the closest thing we have today to Pamela Anderson, and how she’s embarking on this legal career that people aren’t taking that seriously. I thought it was so amazing that Pamela’s publicist asks her, “Who’s your role model?” and Pamela says, “Jane Fonda,” and completely spells out how she’s one of the few examples we have of society allowing a woman to get past the prejudices keeping them from being seen as a full human in the public eye.

Li: But that moment also worked because you feel sad for Pamela Anderson because she does not get the career that Jane Fonda had. And in Episode 6, you see more of her backstory and get the sense that she looked up to someone like Jane Fonda. And this isn’t to discredit Fonda, but she came out of Hollywood royalty. She had a safety net. Someone like Pamela Anderson from Ladysmith, British Columbia, in the outskirts of Vancouver, just doesn’t have that safety net. Everything that she’s reaching for that Jane Fonda got, Anderson just doesn’t have the same resources for.

Kornhaber: The show ends up being a tragedy. Pamela doesn’t get the career that she wanted. There’s this horrible motif of Pamela being like, “It’s just going to blow over.” She’s almost praying for everything to be fine and no one to care about this tape. But scene after scene, that optimism is torn away. And yeah, Episode 6, surrounding this deposition taken for a lawsuit that Pam and Tommy filed against Penthouse, the porn magazine that wanted to republish images of the video, is just so brutal. It’s horrible.

Gilbert: The questions that lawyer asks are just brutal. And then they make her watch portions of the sex tape in front of them to identify people.

Kornhaber: You just want to punch that lawyer through the screen.

Gilbert: It’s vicious misogyny. Real woman-hating bullshit.

Kornhaber: The lawyer is essentially, like, spelling out the logic of misogyny as it fell upon her. It’s this deductive reasoning that says, “You are a worthless piece of trash and you have no rights.” You do learn a lot about how they were pioneering privacy rights and the legal system with this case. No judge would side with this couple whose possessions were stolen and whose most intimate things were plastered everywhere. Judges were buying this argument that it’s a First Amendment commentary. It’s a republished sex tape.

Gilbert: Let’s return to that first question: Have the motivations actually changed in revisiting these incidents, or is it just about a different kind of exploitation? I think this is a really fascinating and urgent question. I don’t know that there’s an easy answer. Obviously, we don’t need someone’s permission to tell a story about them on the internet, especially if the story itself has valuable things to say—which I think this one does—but there is the queasiness that this is a story about someone who is exploited and, while the people involved have said that they’re very much on her side and they want to show her side of things and validate her perspective for the first time almost, I mean, you cannot respect someone’s privacy while making a miniseries about them and about their exploitation without their permission. And for me, it’s a very tricky question to think about when you’re watching the show. I did enjoy it, like you both did. I have my quibbles with it too. On the whole, I found it fascinating. But when it comes to the exploitation question, I don’t know what to make of it.

Kornhaber: Well, yes, it is exploitative. It absolutely is. However, I think most storytelling that’s based in reality is exploitative in some way. Turning something that happened into entertainment is bending the truth. You’re taking liberties with people’s lives. You’re stealing souls with the camera. All that. Joan Didion said that anytime that she wrote, she was doing that. We all have to live with this uncomfortable reality that there is always a trade-off. But in this case, and ideally in the best cases, the trade-off involves honoring the person who’s being exploited and not making their life worse, and maybe even preventing worse exploitation from happening. And I would say this is raising consciousness about the morality of sex tapes, about the way that we treat women and the way we treat celebrities. There’s a lot in here that hopefully will lead to people checking themselves. And so, I’m not a Saint Peter. I can’t say whether or not this is a bad example of the genre. I feel bad for Pam if she doesn’t like it. I would feel bad for Pam anyways from watching the series.

Every year when the Oscar nominations are announced, I have fun keeping an eye out for a particularly rare phenomenon: the “lone screenplay” nominee—that is, a movie that’s recognized only in the category of Best Original Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay. While every member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets to vote on each of the winners, nominees are chosen by specific branches composed of industry professionals. AMPAS’ screenwriter group is often responsible for elevating riveting films that might otherwise have been ignored.

Typically, these films are small-scale works, and therefore unlikely to be nominated for Oscars in technical categories such as Best Production Design. Many of the 23 movies I’m highlighting today marked an exciting feature debut for a new filmmaker, or a long-awaited breakthrough for a more experimental type of storyteller. If you curated a film festival of “lone screenplay” nominees, you’d have a program filled with crowd-pleasers. Here are some of the best examples from this century’s Oscar nominations:

Ghost World (2001)

Terry Zwigoff’s adaptation of the 1997 graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, a seminal Gen X text, retained the book’s wry, detached spirit, gave Scarlett Johansson one of her first significant film roles, and generated serious awards buzz for its stars Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi. In the end, the screenplay (by Zwigoff and Clowes) was nominated, a worthy acknowledgement for a tricky piece of storytelling. Ghost World’s narrative thrives on the detachment of its disaffected teen characters, who drift aimlessly from subplot to subplot; Zwigoff and Clowes’s screenplay channels that atmosphere without sacrificing any pathos.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Amazon Prime

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

To date, this Oscar nomination remains the only one of Owen Wilson’s career; he co-wrote the film with Wes Anderson (the pair also wrote Rushmore and Bottle Rocket), and it became a mainstream breakout for Anderson. The film is a somewhat shocking member of the “lone screenplay nomination” club, given that Gene Hackman’s lead performance is one of the best ever given by the multiple-award winner. The Royal Tenenbaums, an acrid comedy about a family of “geniuses” who have grown estranged and embittered, is impeccably designed, beautifully shot, and still one of Anderson’s greatest achievements. Between its pointed jabs are wallops of deep-seated emotion.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime and Apple TV

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

After emerging in the 1990s as the stylish but heartfelt director of Hollywood adaptations A Little Princess and Great Expectations, the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón returned to his homeland to make a sweaty, sexually explicit coming-of-age film that shockingly vaulted him into the stratosphere. Y Tu Mamá También feels as raw and smart as it did 20 years ago, charting the horny misadventures of two teenage boys (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) who embark on an impromptu road trip with a bored housewife (Maribel Verdú). Cuarón, who co-wrote the film with his brother Carlos, sprinkles a variety of observations about Mexico’s political instability on top of the lurid three-way romance that develops; the screenplay is surprising more for its subtlety than its outré sexuality.

Where to watch: AMC Plus and Apple TV

Universal Studios via Everett About a Boy (2002)

An insightful dramedy from the Weitz brothers, who were at the time best known for making the smash-hit teen sex comedy American Pie. Based on Nick Hornby’s novel, About a Boy follows an overgrown, over-sexed man-child (Hugh Grant) who forms a bond with an awkward boy (Nicholas Hoult) as part of a scheme to woo ladies. About a Boy is a pleasant, breezy watch, but it’s also unafraid to delve into its characters’ insecurities, depict the difficulties of battling clinical depression, and generally thrive on its tenderness. Its single nomination was a solid one, but Grant’s performance deserved similar attention.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Amazon Prime

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Under the Oscars’ present-day rules of awarding 10 Best Picture nominations, this cheerful family comedy probably would have snuck onto that shortlist along with the Best Original Screenplay nod it received. Not because My Big Fat Greek Wedding is that good—it’s a familiar comedy trading in gentle ethnic stereotypes (Greek moms are bossy, and they sure like to eat!) that ends with a nice happy wedding. But it was the kind of massive word-of-mouth phenomenon Hollywood hasn’t seen much of in the 21st century, making $241 million at the domestic box office on a $5 million budget. It’s still the highest-grossing romantic comedy of all time, and Nia Vardalos (who wrote and starred in the film) got at least some of the Oscar recognition she deserved.

Where to watch: HBO Max and Apple TV

[Read: With My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, film finally reaches peak reboot]

Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

Dirty Pretty Things earned a surprising early-career nomination for Steven Knight, a screenwriter who has now become an industry powerhouse as the creator of Peaky Blinders and the writer of excellent films such as Eastern Promises and Locke (along with bombs such as Serenity and Locked Down). Dirty Pretty Things is a robust London-set thriller about two immigrants (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou) who get drawn into the nasty world of black-market organ trading. Knight is fond of thickly underlining the metaphors at play in his scripts, but Dirty Pretty Things still delivers a powerful message about the lives of the modern British underclass. And Ejiofor’s performance is a star-making wonder.  

Where to watch: HBO Max and Apple TV

American Splendor (2003)

Another terrific adaptation with a tricky task at hand—translating a comic book into cinema, specifically the independent, autobiographical American Splendor comics written by the famously irascible Harvey Pekar. Here, he’s played with the right level of bilious discomfort by Paul Giamatti, and the writing-directing team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini center him in a self-aware biopic, one that humorously wonders why such a resolute curmudgeon became a minor American celebrity in the 1980s. Giamatti and Hope Davis (playing Pekar’s wife and collaborator, Joyce Brabner) deserved Oscar attention themselves, but the Academy’s writers’ branch ended up providing the film’s only recognition.

Where to watch: HBO Max and Apple TV

Before Sunset (2004)

Nominating the screenplay of Before Sunset gave Oscar voters the unique chance to acknowledge every major creative player involved with the film: the writer Kim Krizan but also the director Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who collaborated on the script. A surprise sequel to Linklater’s swooning 20-something romance, Before Sunrise (released in 1995), Before Sunset revisits Jesse and Céline, the lovers who met and walked through Vienna together for a night while traveling in Europe, checking in on their reunion nine years later. The movie is dazzling, mostly following, like its predecessor, their spontaneous conversations as they putter around Paris. This time, the drama is even more loaded with regret and sexual tension, revealing why the two remained apart in the intervening years. The film builds to an open-ended finale that’s one of the most tantalizing in the history of the medium.

Where to watch: Tubi, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime

MGM via Everett Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

An unconventional love story written by Nancy Oliver (bafflingly, it remains her only movie credit) and directed by Craig Gillespie, Lars and the Real Girl could so easily have come off as too cloying or too creepy, but it manages to find the right tonal balance. Along with Oliver’s script, the movie is helped by Ryan Gosling’s melancholy performance as Lars, a Wisconsin introvert who falls in love with a “Real Doll” named Bianca that he purchases online. The script carefully sifts through the family trauma that inspires Lars’s odd behavior, while also presenting a slow, soft romance between Lars and his co-worker Margo (Kelli Garner).

Where to watch: Apple TV and Cinemax

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

The British director Mike Leigh famously does not write scripts—his creative process involves gathering actors and building up basic character details and initial story lines together, but keeping them in the dark on other characters’ motivations or coming plot twists. He’s been nominated for seven Oscars, five of them for writing, but for every film he’s had to prepare a screenplay after the fact to present to the Academy. Happy-Go-Lucky was a “lone screenplay” nominee because the dynamic lead performance given by Sally Hawkins was bizarrely overlooked; she plays a schoolteacher with an unshakable glee for life in this fairly formless comedy. Her cheerful ways are challenged when she takes driving lessons from a resolutely enraged teacher (Eddie Marsan), and Leigh wrings fascinating drama from their interactions.

Where to watch: Cinemax

In Bruges (2008)

Though it was written and directed by an acclaimed, Tony-nominated playwright, and starred Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes, and Brendan Gleeson, In Bruges had a slow build to Oscar success, debuting in February to good but not exceptional box-office sales. The anarchic crime comedy is indulgently bloody and follows two hit men trying to lie low in the picturesque Belgian city of Bruges. It’s shot through with the mordant nihilism that created such a splash for Martin McDonagh as a playwright, but the weird mix of violence and humor made the film a tough initial sell. It built up enough buzz to win a Golden Globe for Farrell as the regretful killer Ray, and an eventual Oscar nomination for McDonagh a year after its release.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Amazon Prime

In the Loop (2009)

In a just world, In the Loop would have been recognized across the board by the Academy, because it’s still the best piece of cinematic political satire in decades, but 12 years ago, the film’s one nomination went to Armando Iannucci and his co-writers, Jesse Armstrong (who went on to create Succession), Simon Blackwell, and Tony Roche. The film is a spiritual and geographic bridge between Iannucci’s two hit TV shows, The Thick of It (set in the world of British politics) and Veep (the American equivalent). It depicts the two countries’ slow buildup to a declaration of war in the Middle East as a bumbling farce. Peter Capaldi, playing the nervy director of communications Malcolm Tucker, is undoubtedly the film’s MVP, but James Gandolfini gives a great rare comic turn as a grumpy U.S. lieutenant general alongside a brilliant ensemble.

Where to watch: AMC Plus and Apple TV

Sony Pictures via Everett Another Year (2010)

Mike Leigh’s most recent Oscar nomination came from writing this bittersweet drama, which displays his trademark humanism but with a more forbidding outlook than Happy-Go-Lucky (some of Leigh’s other great works worth checking out include Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies, and Topsy-Turvy). Another Year tracks an older married couple (played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) over a year as they manage various interpersonal dramas, particularly revolving around their friend Mary (Lesley Manville), a tempestuous, depressed middle-aged divorcée. Manville’s performance is the distasteful dynamo powering much of the film’s drama, but Leigh is always careful not to castigate or villainize, keeping the audience’s sympathies balanced through each character’s ups and downs.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Amazon Prime

Margin Call (2011)

One of the first great movies to try to grapple with the effects of the Great Recession, Margin Call is set over 24 hours at an unnamed Wall Street investment bank that is melting down during the initial stages of the crisis. The ensemble piece is focused on the cold-blooded tyrants who helped bring about the economic catastrophe. It succeeds by making its cast of villains remarkably compelling; a standout is a credit trader played with ruthless efficiency by Paul Bettany. The nomination went to the first-time writer and director J. C. Chandor, who has gone on to make All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year, and Triple Frontier.

Where to watch: Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and Peacock

[Read: A financial-crisis film that's on the money]

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Another example of Anderson’s films only getting acknowledgement from the writers’ branch. Moonrise Kingdom came in between the director’s first foray into animation (Fantastic Mr. Fox) and his magnum opus (The Grand Budapest Hotel). It’s a personal favorite for many of his devotees, a gentle ballad of adolescent angst set on a New England island. Moonrise Kingdom features outstanding work from Bruce Willis, as well as the expected strong ensemble work from Anderson regulars such as Tilda Swinton and Bill Murray, but its real stars are the newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward. They play the besotted 12-year-olds driving all of the action.

Where to watch: HBO Max and Apple TV

Before Midnight (2013)

Much like Before Sunset, the last entry in the Jesse and Céline saga got a single Oscar nomination for its collaborative writing. Before Midnight’s screenplay was credited to Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy, though the main characters’ dialogue is so natural and rambling that it’s hard to imagine that it was all committed to the page beforehand. Picking up, once again, nine years after the previous film, Before Midnight replaces Before Sunrise and Sunset’s dreamy romanticism with the more mundane realities of partnership. Still, no other cinema experience quite compares to watching Hawke and Delpy take on a European location (this time, the Peloponnese coast in Greece) while dissecting their partnership. Were a fourth Before film to arrive, it would theoretically be due this year—but Midnight is a perfect-enough ending to the journey.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Amazon Prime

Nightcrawler (2014)

This film was a “lone screenplay” nominee because Jake Gyllenhaal’s arresting, slinky lead performance was snubbed at the 2015 Oscars, a surprise given the physical transformation he underwent for the role (which is usually bait for awards voters). Gyllenhaal plays the hauntingly skinny and pale petty thief Lou Bloom, a sociopath who realizes he can make money by being the first to arrive at crime scenes, filming them, and then selling the footage to local news. His obsession then unfolds in unsettling ways, and the writer Dan Gilroy (also making his directorial debut) delivers a taut script designed to keep the viewer guessing until the last minute.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Amazon Prime

Universal Studios via Everett Straight Outta Compton (2015)

One of the most exciting films of 2015, F. Gary Gray’s epic rendering of the rise and fall of the rap group N.W.A. was tipped for broader Oscar success but ended up with only a Best Original Screenplay nomination for Jonathan Herman, Andrea Berloff, S. Leigh Savidge, and Alan Wenkus. The film succeeds because of its earnest tone, treating the career of Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), and others with seriousness and care, especially in its depiction of Eazy-E’s death from AIDS. But its greatest passion is reserved for the group’s music; Gray sells the transformative cultural impact N.W.A. had in just a few years of existence.

Where to watch: FuboTV, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime

[Read: Straight Outta Compton and the social burdens of hip-hop]

20th Century Women (2016)

Another film that was the victim of an unexpected acting snub. Annette Bening was ignored for this compassionate dramedy from Mike Mills, a director who specializes in naturalistic dialogue and warm character sketches. I am fond of all of his films (Beginners was an Oscar winner; this year’s C’mon C’mon is his most recent effort), but 20th Century Woman is his best work, an autobiographical tale, set in 1979, about a teen boy being raised by a commanding single mother (Bening), who runs a boarding house populated with offbeat characters. Mills has such a gift for making every interaction feel genuine, and 20th Century Women is suffused with love for its mixed-up, flawed ensemble.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Showtime

The Lobster (2016)

The Lobster was something of a breakout for the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, who had already snagged a Best Foreign Film nomination for the unfiltered black comedy Dogtooth. Co-written with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou, The Lobster is ingenious low-tech sci-fi, set in a world where single people have 45 days to find a partner or they are transformed into an animal of their choice. Colin Farrell plays David, an awkward lump of a man; Rachel Weisz is the “short-sighted woman” he eventually becomes obsessed with. The Lobster is a brutally bleak satire of how superficial and nonsensical our notions of “compatibility” are; like any Lanthimos film, it can cause you to gasp in horror at one moment and laugh with delight at the next.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Showtime

The Big Sick (2017)

Married couple Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani were nominated for their writing in this charming romantic comedy based on their own dramatic courtship. Nanjiani even plays a version of himself on-screen: a Chicago comedian defying his Pakistani parents’ expectation that he enter an arranged marriage. Instead, he begins dating Emily (Zoe Kazan), whom he meets at his stand-up show. But just as their relationship starts to falter, she is hospitalized with a lung infection and induced into a coma, putting Kumail in the ill-timed position of spending days and nights at her bedside with her parents (played by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter). The Big Sick has an idiosyncratic narrative structure that can come only from imitating real life.

Where to watch: Amazon Prime and Apple TV

First Reformed (2018)

This intense, introspective drama was an Oscar landmark in that it was the first nomination for the writer-director Paul Schrader, the frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator behind screenplays such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Like those movies (and many more that Schrader directed himself), First Reformed is a singular study of madness, following a disillusioned pastor in upstate New York (played by Ethan Hawke) struggling with his faith as he becomes convinced of an impending climate apocalypse. It’s a grim film, powered by Hawke’s unprecedented performance (he was sadly overlooked by the Academy) and a real sense of existential menace, building to a climax that feels both devastating and entirely earned.

Where to watch: Apple TV and Showtime

The White Tiger (2021)

The most recent “lone screenplay” nominee was Ramin Bahrani’s excellent, if sprawling, adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel. The White Tiger is a picaresque tale of an Indian man’s escape from poverty to business success, and of ambition being muddied by morality. Adarsh Gourav is an enigmatic lead as Balram Halwai, a boy haunted by his father’s debts; as an adult, Balram becomes a chauffeur to a local businessman, then uses that position to climb the ranks of power and influence, often through dubious bits of subterfuge. Writer-director Bahrani is a skilled social chronicler, and in The White Tiger he works on his biggest canvas yet.

Where to watch: Netflix