NEW YORK, NY.- In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?

Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.

Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.

The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.

Here’s the thing: according to the guild, “Barbie” is an original screenplay, but the academy disagreed. The academy also reclassified “Origin,” which didn’t receive a nomination but is an interesting case in this argument. Ava DuVernay crafted a screenplay that’s sort of based on Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book “Caste,” but is also a movie about Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) researching and writing “Caste.” It’s a nesting doll of a screenplay, and the guild deemed it an original, presumably because the screenplay has a narrative the book lacks. The academy begged to differ. (An even more extreme example is Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for “Adaptation,” a movie about a man named Charlie Kaufman adapting Susan Orlean’s book “The Orchid Thief,” and which was brain-twistingly categorized as adapted at the 2003 Oscars. It lost, to “The Pianist.”)

The reclassification of “Barbie” has gotten more airtime, given its immense popularity. There are compelling arguments on both sides. For instance, there’s a lot of “Barbie” already out there: The characters inhabit a world of their own, established through decades of marketing and even direct-to-video movies about them, and some of the film depends on knowing Barbie lore.

But for every example there’s a counterexample. Yes, “Barbie” depends a little on your knowledge of what Barbie, Ken, Skipper and Midge stand for. But a lot of people who saw “Barbie” didn’t have firsthand experience with the Barbie universe (some of us, ahem, weren’t even allowed to play with them), and I doubt they were very confused. Your need to be familiar with Barbie as a concept to understand “Barbie” seems roughly equivalent to your need to know that rich kids drive convertibles to watch any number of teen movies.

Furthermore, do you know what movie once received a best original screenplay nomination? “Toy Story,” which had some new characters (like Woody and Buzz Lightyear) but also the Slinky dog and the Potato Head family and the little green army men. It’s not equivalent, but it’s worth reflecting on the consistency of the academy’s choices here.

There are also arguments on the original screenplay side, like the simple fact that the “Barbie” script is so imaginative it’s practically a deconstruction of its own concept, and it doesn’t take as its jumping-off point any specific existing story about Barbie. Gerwig and Baumbach, in other words, made it all up. What better definition of “original” exists?

Then again, Gerwig’s screenplay for “Little Women” was up, correctly, for the adapted statuette (it lost to “Jojo Rabbit”). Those of us who love Louisa May Alcott’s novel and know it inside and out are well aware that “Little Women” also deconstructs that novel, considering its cultural context and themes in a light that previous films haven’t. But it’s still clearly an adaptation. Is “Barbie” any different?

I have been turning all of this over in my head for weeks, arguing about it with my editor and my friends and, one day, my acupuncturist. I tweeted ambivalently about it. I don’t have an answer to the “Barbie” question.

But in all the discourse I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something off about the Oscars’ screenplay categories, and it ought to be fixed.

THERE’S A STRANGE AND THORNY LOGIC to the way the academy categorizes movies about real people and real events. Take a look at the list of best original screenplay nominees in the past 20 years, and a weird trend surfaces: A striking number of the nominees and winners are about real people and the events of their lives. The screenwriters, one assumes, had to use existing biographies, histories and memoirs to craft “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “Vice,” “Green Book” and “Spotlight.” (Those last two even won.) They’re all movies for which the characters and basic plots existed before the screenwriters went to work, but according to the academy, they’re all original. Indeed, this year, “Maestro” was nominated in the original category, which counted among its hopefuls “Air,” “Rustin” and “The Iron Claw” — all movies about real people, based very much on real events. (“May December,” which also landed a nomination, is very loosely based on the Mary Kay LeTourneau case, but it’s such a sticky wicket when it comes to these designations. My gut tells me original is where it belongs.)

But wait! Check out the history of the best adapted screenplay category, and it gets weirder. Among recent winners are “Argo,” “12 Years a Slave,” “The Imitation Game,” “The Big Short” and “BlacKkKlansman” — all screenplays about real people doing things that really happened. And this year, “Oppenheimer” was nominated in this category, triumphing over similar hopefuls like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Ferrari” and “BlackBerry.”

The more I thought about this, the more mystifying it seemed, until I realized what the difference was. It seems the dividing line here, in the academy’s eyes, isn’t about narrative, the way it is with the Writers Guild rules. It’s about intellectual property.

Josh Singer and Bradley Cooper wrote “Maestro,” which is about Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre, but since it’s not explicitly based on a single book about either of them, the academy deems it original. The credits of “Oppenheimer,” on the other hand, list Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin as writers alongside Christopher Nolan, because they penned the J. Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus.” That film and the snubbed “Killers of the Flower Moon” take wildly inventive approaches to their source material, messing with time, structure, and even themes and characters, but with that explicitly named underlying material in their credits, they’re considered adapted.

But oddly, stories that are completely fictional can be treated in almost the opposite manner. The rules state that all it takes for a screenplay to count as “adapted” is for some of its characters to have existed previously. That’s why both “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Glass Onion” landed in adapted. All sequels are, in the eyes of the academy (and the guild), adapted. No matter that the story was completely invented by the screenwriter.

In a metaphysical sense, Leonard Bernstein “existed” far more than Detective Benoit Blanc. But only one of them triggers the adapted designation. Without diving into some kind of ontological rumination, I think we can agree that this isn’t really about “existence.” It’s about copyrights owned by corporations — in other words, it’s about intellectual properties.

And that makes a measure of sense. Movies, especially in Hollywood, are an uneasy marriage of commerce and art, and commerce tends to be the leading foot. In the United States, nobody owns the character of a public figure (not even the figure), but someone owns the copyright to a biography. So there you are.

There are other goofy matters in the divided screenplay categories. Consider the fate of “Moonlight” (2016), which the director and screenwriter Barry Jenkins based on playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished, unproduced play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” When the film reached awards season, the Writers Guild classified Jenkins’ screenplay as original, given that McCraney’s play hadn’t, in a sense, been entered into the public record before the film appeared. The academy moved it to adapted. And it won.

Or consider “Whiplash” (2014). Its writer-director, Damien Chazelle, reportedly didn’t realize the drama had been put in the adapted category until Oscar ballots went out to voters. He’d written the full screenplay years earlier but, like many independent filmmakers, needed to raise the money to make it, and so he shot a slice of it as a proof of concept. The resulting short went to Sundance, where it won awards and got him the money needed to proceed with the full film. That, apparently, was enough to designate it as adapted. (It didn’t win, though it nabbed three other Oscars.)

The truth is that like many things in Hollywood, these decisions are made by people with subjective opinions and ideas that can shift depending on who’s making the call and when. They’re not wholly unlike the legendarily inconsistent movie ratings — partly based on rules and partly just vibes.

THERE’S NO DIVINE MANDATE to have two writing-focused categories rather than one or 28 or three. (Until 1956, the Oscars gave out three awards, including one for best story; it was eliminated with the demise of the old studio system.) But having two makes sense, if the goal is to “recognize excellence in cinematic achievements.” The first celebrates the skillful imagining (literally, making images of that which has not been seen) of a new story, one that hasn’t been told before. The second celebrates a reimagining.

Setting aside certain cinephiles’ squeamishness about characterizing a screenplay only in terms of its story (I am among these, but that’s another tale for another time), this is, I think, about as correct as we’re ever going to get. In a perfect world, the voting members would read each script and vote based on its merit as literature, given the many things that audience members never know about — beautifully crafted description, for instance — or innovation that sometimes pops up on the page. This year, for instance, Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” screenplay is a favorite in the adapted category; it’s written in the first person, which makes for a highly unusual reading experience. (Check it out. It’s cool.)

The point of these two categories, though, is to signal that overlapping but distinct craft choices must be made in two different kinds of writing. The first involves inventing a story in a nonexistent world. The second involves reshaping and refashioning something existing into something new. That could involve translating between mediums with different formal conventions. Or it could mean finding a new way into the story entirely, illuminating it in a fresh way.

Obviously there’s a whole mess of tangly bits to deal with here, and entire fields of academic study, often deeply bound to their time and place, are devoted to hollering about what counts as adaptation. The Oscars will never be the place for snooty cinephiles like myself to exercise our theories and pet squabbles.

But there’s some caprice in all of this that might be fixed, a little, if only to help people like me sleep better at night (and filmmakers have a better sense of what they’ve just made). If the goal of the academy is to reward filmmakers for reaching new heights in their crafts, then pegging the categories to rules that respect their actual work is more in line with the aims than making them about intellectual property. Turning a true story into a movie requires adaptation, whether there’s one biography or a dozen involved. If the powers that be wish to preserve the odious sequel rule, treating individual characters’ existence as the litmus test, then fine. Just be consistent, and don’t try to tell me that Bayard Rustin was wholly invented by his screenwriter.

Will that mean changing the names of the categories? No, I don’t think so. Would that change the designation of “Barbie”? It wouldn’t. But it would make it all much cleaner.

There’s another way, of course, that would focus the categories more narrowly on the invention or adaptation of story beats. In that world, “Barbie” is original, and so is “Whiplash.” But “Maestro” becomes adapted; “Glass Onion” becomes original. And “Oppenheimer” probably stays where it is. The result of this, of course, would be to push all (or nearly all) movies based on true stories to the adapted category, leaving the original category for pure invention.

Would that be bad? I think not. It might remove incentive for the kind of boring soup-to-nuts biopics that used to show up a lot at the Oscars, though they’ve fallen off lately, and bring more inventive biographical films, like the ones we’ve been lucky enough to see this year, to the foreground. In other words, it would mean true innovation in the craft would be rewarded in the adapted category. And it might also inspire highly original and inventive sequels.

Who knows? Like everything else in show business, whacking one mole causes three more to pop up. But if the result is focusing the awards more on craft than on big corporate holdings, we’ll all be winners.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.