Oscars 2015: Real Stories 'Easier to Sell' Amid Best Picture Race

Feb. 18, 2015— -- Just when it seemed the biopic had grown stale, director Ava DuVernay helped breathe new life into the genre, resulting in an Academy Award nomination for "Selma."

"Selma" is one of four films based on a true story among the eight best picture nominees. Not bad for a genre many thought had jumped the shark.

Then again, Hollywood loves its biopics. In the past four years, three of the best picture winners - "12 Years a Slave," "Argo" and "The King's Speech" - were based on real stories.

"It's easier to sell a biopic," Thelma Adams, film editor for ZEALnyc.com, told ABC News. "You can say, 'This is what it is. Here’s the book. I’m adapting it.'"

When the central character is also a well-known historical figure, it's even easier for Hollywood, and audiences, to grasp.

"It's automatically rooted. There's less explaining that has to be done and less selling," Adams said. "We know their achievements wherever the movie starts. We know they are important."

So how do you make biopics more than just living memorials to their subjects?

"For me this was a real challenge: How does someone who doesn’t like historical dramas direct a historical drama?" DuVernay, the first director to bring King's life to the big screen, told The Los Angeles Times. "Particularly when it comes to historical dramas that deal with black history and black folks, there’s a bit of a sugarcoating. There’s a brightly lit world of negativity to positivity, not a real deep dive into the way that it felt."

So DuVernay, 42, strived to show the man behind the myth, putting King at the center of the narrative and surrounding him by the other brilliant strategists, including women, of the Civil Rights movement. She focused on the brief but bloody Selma campaign for black voting rights, without flinching from the violence of that three-month period.

"The difference between a good and horrible biopic is where you slice the life," Adams said. "If you get the right slice, you get a better movie."

DuVernay's film arrived at an epochal moment in current history.

"All historical movies are rooted in the present," Adams said. "One of the reasons 'Selma' is so vivid is there have been a lot of racial conflicts recently. It's a mirror to our own times and continued struggle."

It's also why "American Sniper" has been criticized. "It's not in sync with current politics in Hollywood," Adams said.

And why "The Imitation Game," despite having a protagonist who was prosecuted for being gay in the '50s, seems less relevant than television's "The Normal Heart," which was about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

"Ten years ago that would have been hugely radical because a gay man was at the center," Adams said.

"Even though the biopic sounds worn out, there's still a lot of life in it," Adams concluded. "Capturing the essence of a life, the essence of a time; that’s the challenge. It's both singular and universal. The ones that work and make it to the end are successful at being both singular and universal."