Daniel D’Addario had a busier Oscars season than most.
The Variety chief correspondent has been on the movies and television beat for a long time, so it makes sense that he would pay close attention to the Academy Awards — but the season was even more surreal than usual for D’Addario. His debut novel, “The Talent,” was published in February, less than a week before the Oscars — and it deals with the lead-up to Hollywood’s biggest night.
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The novel follows the five women nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, including Jenny Van Meer, a respected actress starring in a Maria Callas biopic, and her supposed rival, Adria Benedict, who has won three Oscars to Jenny’s zero. There’s also Contessa Lyle, nominated for a film version of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”; Bitty Harbor, starring in a Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson biopic; and Davina Schwartz, a Hollywood outsider who appears in an artsy version of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus.”
D’Addario talked about “The Talent” via telephone before the Oscars ceremony. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q: You’ve reported on film and TV for a while now. What made you decide to take the leap into fiction?
I’ve always been interested in different types of writing, and I spend so much of my time professionally thinking about the entertainment industry that it just lent itself elegantly as a stepping stone into the world of fiction. I interviewed Cord Jefferson when “American Fiction” was about to launch, and I asked him, “You’ve been a journalist, a magazine writer, a blogger, and now you’re a screenwriter. How does that even work?” It was a question on my mind because I was in the process of working on my own book, and he said something along the lines of, “If you’re a writer, you’re a writer, and if you can write a book, you can write an article, you can write a screenplay. Storytelling is storytelling, the fundamentals are the same.” I have found that to be true. The situations in this story are made up by me, and there’s a pleasure and a freedom to that, but the rock-solid fundamentals are the same.
Q: Did any one of the characters come to you first when you were developing the novel?
I had the thought that the tension between someone who always loses and someone who always wins. I think Jenny came to me first, because that situation was inherently interesting to me. But then there became this question of, in a world where you’ve been nominated for a prize four, five, six, seven times and you’ve never won one, what does it take to keep going back? Is it an admirable faith in oneself and refusal to give up? Is it a somewhat delusional refusal to accept reality? Is it somewhere in between? We shouldn’t assign a value judgment to it, but it’s just human nature to refuse to accept the limitation.
Q: Was it fun or challenging coming up with the fictional movies in the novel?
Oh, it was the most fun part. It was certainly a challenge, but it was the most fun part as well, because I had many goals for this book, and one of them was for it to be funny. And so in some of these cases, with the characters speaking about movies that they’d done previously in their careers, It was just a chance for me to be a little absurd and tickle my own funny bone while also thinking critically about what would actually get nominated for an Oscar. I took it as a sort of cosmic coincidence that about 10 years ago I saw a documentary about Maria Callas and thought to myself, “OK, I’ve got to do something with that.” I wrote it into the book, and then this year Angelina Jolie was in a movie about Maria Callas.
It was funny just thinking about how to describe scenes in the movies so it wouldn’t be repetitious. I wanted there to be multiple dynamics where there were questions about who was lead and who was supporting, because not only is that a big part of the Oscars every year, but to me is kind of a philosophical question of what does it mean to be the lead, and what does it mean to support someone else, and why is being the lead better? These were questions I kind of wanted to delve into in the two films where there are lead versus supporting distinctions.
Thinking about the women in “Wicked,” one could make the argument that it’s a film with two co-leads, but they didn’t do it that way. Zoe Saldaña in “Emilia Pérez” is another very pertinent example. She probably will win, but I would join the people saying that she is the lead of the film, but it went a different way in terms of the category placement. So it’s just interesting to play with.
Q: You cover the Oscars as a journalist, and you’re doing publicity for this novel about Oscar season. How is it having those worlds collide?
I don’t think anyone could have possibly anticipated that the best actress field this year would have been a really competitive race, and also the locus of so much scandal and drama. I think if I’d gone to a publisher with a book about everything that’s happened in our real world over the past month or so with between claims that legions of Brazilian fans are uplifting Fernanda Torres to old tweets of Karla Sofía Gascón, they would’ve said, “Well, the problem is books need to be credible. They have to do things you could believe would happen.”
So it’s a very exciting time to be an Oscar watcher … and it feels like a happy coincidence that I get to walk alongside it in my extracurricular writing as well.
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