Oscar nominations: 15 films that came from the printed page

The Oscars have always loved movies that were taken from the written word. This year is no exception as 15 films that were written works first earned nods from the Academy.

Claire Folger/Warner Bros./AP

1. 'Argo'

Claire Folger/Warner Bros./AP

Director Ben Affleck's film about how the CIA smuggled Americans out of Iran in 1979 was based on a 2007 article by Joshuah Bearman in Wired titled "How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans From Tehran." The movie got nods for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Music (Original Score), Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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