“Bella, I am a good guy. You have to trust me on this,” a man says to a woman.

The eyes have it.

The 2024 Academy Awards are ready to roll on Sunday, March 10, offering an event that’s kind of like the Super Bowl for movie nerds. Yet while that comparison is apt in some ways, there’s one area where we lag behind our sports-loving counterparts: the “prop bet.”

Whenever a novel morphs into a film without losing its spirit or quality, it’s a small miracle. It makes one believe in a possibility of effective communication between genres.

Maybe director Ridley Scott and star Joaquin Phoenix came to Napoleon just wanting to work together again 20-plus years after Gladiator; maybe the lure of exploring one of the most famous people in history was too much to resist. Or maybe, just maybe, after a certain regime in American histo…