Yeah, and I do agree with you here 100%.

Although, going back a few years, one of the few times I leap off my seat and cheered an Oscar win was to Martin Landau for his Bela Lugosi portrayal from Ed Wood. According to reports, it was not a true portrayal of Lugosi, but is was a helluva performance (I thought).

I can't argue with that (and I don't feel that being a remake necessarily hampers The Departed; yes, I know this is inconsistent with my practice of starting mimicry performances in the penalty box) but one big difference, I think, is that with a filmed remake of another film you are provided not just with story or specific dialog but also camera angles, editing decisions, pacing, staging, etc. You can pick what has already worked on film once while tweaking what has already been shown to not. In other words, while those other sources help with story they don't necessary help with the cinematic parts. I think United 93 should have been nominated for best picture (though not win) and there wasn't anything "creative" in the movie; it was intentionally un-creative.

Not having seen Infernal Affairs I don't know how much Scorcese benefited from all of that or if it was essentially like starting from scratch with a screenplay.

Interestingly, though, if the sequel to The Departed gets made it won't be a remake of the sequel to Internal Affairs since the American sequel will apparently focus on the Mark Wahlberg character that doesn't exist in the original version.

I definitely give more creative credit to films adapted from other media than I do ones remade from another film for this very reason. As evidenced by the early days of film, transferring theatric stage direction to the camera just doesn't cut it. Even dialog and story doesn't survive direct translation to screen. It takes quite a bit of creative effort to take a good play or novel and make it a good movie. With something that was already a movie once, much of that effort is already done for you.

Shakespeare, of course, borrowed most of his story lines from other relatively popular source material in various forms.

In the broadest sense, there are really only so many stories that can be told, and they get told over and over again.

I guess I don't care much if the story is a remake or the character has a place IRL. I just want a compelling story and quality acting - and great visuals.

Everything old is new again.

Hear, hear.

And I agree as well.

I didn't walk out of Ray saying "well, that would have been a great movie if only it had been a complete work of fiction." It was a great movie.

Where it begins to be relevant to me is when prompted to make qualitative and comparative evaluations. Forest Whitaker and Peter O'Toole were both fantastic and yet we discuss which was best. When asked to make such a calculation, personally, the fact that O'Toole's character had to be created from whole cloth while Whitaker was, to some degree, simply recreating a real person leads me to devalue his performance in relation to Peter O'Toole's. But the Last King of Scotland remains a remarkable movie in many ways (I pointed out my complaints in the random thread after seeing it).

Perhaps that is why I have this discrepancy between acting "remakes" and Best Picture "remakes" since best picture brings it all together and is about the complete package more than its component parts.

I think it would be more of a challenge as an actor to recreate an IRL character then to create a character from scratch.

I don't think so. It brings to mind the recreation of the statue of David that stands outside, where the original David used to stand, in front of the Medici palace. It is a truly remarkable reproduction and took an amount of skill that almost no one in the world could have matched...but the creation of the original remains a more impressive accomplishment.

I wouldn't say that a film being a remake/adaptation means I by default enjoy it less. But in terms of selecting a film to award, remakes start on lower footing in my mind.

Though I think I'm the opposite of Alex in that I cut actors portraying real people more slack than films that have been remade. To me, translating a real personality into a character that plays well on screen is more akin to adapting a book or play than remaking an existing film. So I give that process more credence.