Forget “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Django Unchained,” and “Flight”  — Manti Te’o and Notre Dame deserve the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It takes some skill to come up with a narrative as riveting as Te’o’s.

He came back for his senior season, his girlfriend and grandmother died within six hours of each other and he used that great story to crash the Heisman Trophy presentation in New York City.

Would Te’o have been mentioned in the same breath with Georgia linebacker Jarvis Jones or South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney if his background story didn’t make the rest of the country feel sorry for him? No way.

Te’o played for an undefeated team at a school with one of college football’s richest traditions and a Pulitzer fairy tale to boot. Imagine for a second if he had indeed won the Heisman Trophy.

It was probably one hell of a ride for Te’o his last season in South Bend, but he would have rather been beaten 1500-0 by Alabama in the championship than have what was revealed on Wednesday come to light.

After Deadspin came out with a report of Te’o’s girlfriend being as real as Santa Claus, Notre Dame officials released a statement saying they discovered he received a call from his girlfriend’s number Dec. 26. They said Te’o was a victim of a hoax by a girl who “conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia.”

Let me guess, they’re going to release another statement blaming Notre Dame’s putrid effort in the BCS National Championship Game on the scandal?

Te’o was supposedly duped by a girl who he had never met — except he had. Deadspin’s report notes on Nov. 12, 2009, after Stanford’s victory against Notre Dame, Te’o and his supposed girlfriend Lennay Kekua’s, “stares got pleasantly tangled,” according to the South Bend Tribune. 

He told ESPN in an October interview she was “the most beautiful girl [he had] ever met.” Those phone conversations must have been intense.

Te’o released a statement after the Deadspin story, going back on how he met his girlfriend.

“This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online,” Te’o said in the statement. “We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her.”

Sorry Manti, but even if I did believe you, have you ever seen the movie “Catfish”? The movie where a guy meets the girl of his dreams on Facebook only to find out she’s a middle-aged woman? Apparently Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick has.

Swarbrick used “Catfish” as a reason he could be sure Te’o wasn’t in some way behind the scandal. Wait, is this real life?

He added insult to injury by saying Te’o was “the perfect mark” for a hoax like this.

Oh really, Jack? Te’o must have had such a huge target on his back when he was a freshman on a 6-6 Notre Dame team.

If the school knew on Dec. 26 that Te’o’s girlfriend never existed, why didn’t we find out until Jan. 16?

Obviously Notre Dame didn’t see Te’o’s soar in popularity coming. It couldn’t have predicted the Fighting Irish would go 12-0 in the regular season or that he would become a Heisman Trophy candidate.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that they have known about this for 22 days and did nothing to let the truth come out.

What makes it tragic for the college football world is that Te’o didn’t win the Lott Trophy, Walter Camp Award and runner-up for the Heisman because he was the best linebacker in the country. It was because his grandmother and girlfriend died allegedly in the span of six hours and he was forced to play with that burden the entire season.

Guys like Jones and LSU linebacker Kevin Minter had better numbers than Te’o, but lost out to him because he had a story that made people feel bad for him.

The Fighting Irish were college football’s golden children during the 2012 season because they had do-no-wrong Te’o leading them into battle. So much for that.

I don’t want to harp too much on the guy, because his grandmother did die and this seems like a white lie that turned into a colossal mess. I have no idea what kind of pressure comes with being a college football superstar.

But some lingering questions still remain. If Kekua really was the love of Te’o’s life, why didn’t he attend the funeral? If Notre Dame’s star player was being extorted by someone, why weren’t the authorities contacted?

It would have still been a interesting story if this happened to an average college football player, but because Manti became such a polarizing figure this season, it even puts Lance Armstrong’s Oprah interview airing today on the backburner.

Something could have been done so that this news wasn’t broken by someone outside the Notre Dame football program or the Te’o family, who was supposedly set to release a story on the situation next week.

I can’t take Notre Dame or Te’o’s weak responses to the Deadspin story for what they are. And neither should you.