The race for those five Oscars nominations for Best Original Screenplay is poised to be a frenzied one
The Best Original Screenplay category is where the party’s at. Photo: Andrew Cooper/Sony Pictures Seemingly every year, the Best Screenplay categories at the Oscars suffer from an imbalance. Some years are chock-full of prestige adaptations of literary fiction, biographies, or stage plays, while the original scripts are a shallower pool. Other years are heavier on original work, still resulting in a lopsided ledger.
Original Screenplay, though? Well, you might as well have Tiffany Haddish call the category “Chernobyl,” because it’s where the party is at this year, and the WGA and BAFTA nominations proved it. 1917 continues to show its strength in surprising ways; just a day after winning the Golden Globes for Best Picture and Best Director, the Sam Mendes–directed World War I film got a surprising WGA nod for its screenplay.
1917 joins three films that most people expected to show up on the WGA list: Marriage Story, Parasite, and Knives Out. All three are very script-forward films from auteurist filmmakers and should prove to be solid Oscar contenders. The surprise fifth slot went to the hugely popular teen comedy Booksmart, whose smarts and heart could have some people wondering if it might stand a chance to repeat last year’s upset win by Eighth Grade.
Almost as big a story as what was nominated was what wasn’t eligible in the first place. The WGA is famously the most restrictive guild when it comes to holding the line and making sure only guild members’ scripts are eligible. This tends to knock out foreign language contenders like Pedro Almodovar’s Pain & Glory and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, both of which were held out of competition.
But here’s the fun part: When it comes to the Oscars, everyone’s let back into the pool. All five of these WGA nominees for Original Screenplay will wrestle it out with Tarantino , Almodovar, and Wang, plus today’s one true snub: the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, which took home the prize for Best Director at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards this week.
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