Screams and Curses: A 'Beast' Nominee Gets the News The screenwriter Lucy Alibar based parts of "Beasts of the Southern Wild" on her own relationship with her father, who lives in the rural South and never saw her one-act play, from which the indie hit and best picture nominee was adapted. So it was particularly gratifying to have him and her mother be a part of her Oscar morning on Thursday. "I didn't think they had a TV that worked," she said, "but I guess they did, they were watching it." She was home in New York, and her parents were in Florida, on speakerphone. When her name was called -- she and Benh Zeitlin, the director, are up for best adapted screenplay -- "my dad went crazy," she said. I thought he was really angry, because he was cussing so much. When he gets excited he just throws things around. As for her, "I kind of just started shivering and hyperventilating," she said. Mr. Zeitlin, the surprise best director nominee, "just seemed beside himself," she said. I think we were both vibrating from the shock. We just got on the phone and screamed for a while. Ms. Alibar, who just over a year ago was still making ends meet by selling T-shirts for downtown musicals, said that overall the shift in her life, from struggling writer to Oscar nominee, has barely registered. "Because I'm not an actress, there's not a Hollywood makeover," she said. I get to keep my life pretty much the same, which I like. Even her mementos from the set of "Beasts," filmed in a far bayou in Louisiana, were unglamorous - mostly photos she snapped herself. "It's a lot of half-naked people in the swamp building boats and building houses, with all these scavenged dead animals that our prop master put together," she said. I took a lot of pictures of the pigs being green-screened with their aurochs costumes on. They're really cute.