ACADEMY AWARDS Nolan Nominated For `Memento’ By Rebecca Regan-Sachs Hoya Staff Writer

When the Academy Award nominations were announced Feb. 12, Georgetown graduate Jonathan “Jonah” Nolan (COL ’99) was sleeping. He was awakened at 5:45 a.m. Pacific time by a friend on the East Coast calling to tell him that he and his brother, Christopher, had just received a Best Original Screenplay nomination for their movie Memento.

“This is great, really amazing,” Nolan said, having failed to fall back to sleep that day because of the successive string of congratulatory calls. Inspired by the condition of anteriograde amnesia that he learned about in a Georgetown psychology class, Nolan wrote a short story entitled “Memento ori” about a man with this illness trying to deal with a traumatic event in his past. He shared his ideas with his older brother Chris, who was working as a screenwriter and director in California. Together, they developed the project that would eventually become Memento: a movie, told backward, about a man trying to seek revenge who cannot remember what has happened to him in the recent past.

“I think it challenges the audience,” Nolan says. “It asks the audience to be complicit in making the film.”

The idea of being nominated for an Oscar had crossed his mind, he says, like it does with most people in Hollywood, but “you never really expect this kind of recognition.”

“I was kind of hoping to struggle longer,” 25-year-old Nolan explained. “We went from nowhere to lots of recognition in a short amount of time.” He said he’s trying not to take that recognition too seriously now. “The whole concept of awards is dangerous,” he said, noting the number of high-quality movies that did not get nominations this year. “You kind of have to take it with a grain of salt.”

At the same time, though, he admitted that getting the nomination was “really cool. It’s a great honor . a tremendous honor.” It was even more special to share the nomination with his brother, he said. “It’s really nice to work with your family. To share recognition with them is fantastic.”

In addition to the prestige of a nomination, the blessing from the Academy tends to endow its recipients with greater weight and success in a notoriously difficult industry.

“This ensures that people will at the very least look at what I have to write,” Nolan says.

After the success of his debut screenplay, Nolan said he hopes to break into “the big stuff.” In addition to working on adapting the novel The Prestige by Christopher Priest about two rival magicians, he is writing his own novel.

On Feb. 5, Nolan returned to his alma mater to speak about emento and about his experiences at Georgetown and beyond. “It was really nice to come back,” he said.

Unlike his now well-known character in Memento, Nolan said he can remember the recent past vividly – and it is a very nice memory.

“First I got to go back to Georgetown, then a week later we got the Oscar nomination,” he said. “It’s been a really great week.”