After making a name for himself writing for the small screen, Cord Jefferson called it “surreal” Sunday evening after winning the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “American Fiction.”
“Look, there’s a Victor Hugo quote that he says, `Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” Jefferson said backstage at the Dolby Theatre. “And so, you know, I was very passionate about this film. Everybody who worked this film is very passionate about it. Nobody was there for the money because we didn’t have any money. So people were there because they believed in it. And so, to be here now and to receive this — this kind of response is — is, yeah, it feels incredibly surreal. I’m so grateful for it. I think everybody on the film is so grateful for it.”
Jefferson, an Arizona native, was previously known for his work in television, including writing for shows such as “Master of None” and NBC’s “The Good Place.” He won an Emmy for writing on HBO’s limited series “Watchmen.”
“American Fiction,” the story of a writer who pens a satirical novel out of frustration, only to have it inexplicably taken for high-brow literature, was adapted from Percival Everett’s “Erasure.”
In accepting the Oscar, Jefferson urged filmmakers to take more risks, and instead of focusing on big-budget blockbusters, take that money and make multiple films. He said backstage the message he wanted to get across was the need to tell a wider variety of stories, particularly about Black characters.
“Hopefully the … lesson here, … kind of what I tried to convey in my speech is that there’s an audience for things that are different,” he said. “There is — there is an appetite for things that are different. And, you know, a story with Black characters that’s going to appeal to a lot of people doesn’t need to take place on a plantation, doesn’t need to take place in the projects, doesn’t need to have drug dealers in it, doesn’t need to have gang members in it.
“But there’s an audience for different depictions of people’s lives, and that it — there is a market for depictions of black life that are as broad and as deep as any other depictions of people’s lives.”