Some award season honors are bellwethers for Oscar acting nominations. Others provide hints of where the Academy’s Documentary and Animation branches may be leaning toward with their own individual categories. When it comes to Adapted Screenplay, the WGA Awards are your best bet, but the USC Scripter Awards has increasingly made a name for itself as an Oscar bellwether. That’s good news for the screenwriters of “One Night In Miami,” “Nomadland” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” among others.
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Now in its 33rd year, the Scripters honor not only the screenwriter but the author of the original source material. Besides the aforementioned films, the writers of “Bad Education” and “First Cow” were also recognized. Screenplays that didn’t make the cut include “The Father,” “Mank,” “News of the World,” “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” and “Shirley,” among others.
The television nominees included the writers of “The Good Lord Bird,” “Normal People,” “The Plot Against America,” “Unorthodox” and “The Queen’s Gambit.”
This year, 87 film and 65 episodic series adaptations were submitted. The selection committee included film critics and media members Leonard Maltin, Anne Thompson and Kenneth Turan; authors Michael Chabon and Janet Fitch; screenwriters Greta Gerwig, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby; producers Jennifer Todd and Paula Wagner; and USC deans Elizabeth Daley of the School of Cinematic Arts and Catherine Quinlan of the USC Libraries.
Traditionally, the winners are announced at a dinner held on the USC campus. Due to the pandemic, the ceremony will take place virtually on Saturday, Mar. 13, 2020 at scripter.usc.edu.
A complete list of this year’s nominees is as follows:
Film nominations
Mike Makowsky for “Bad Education” based on the New York magazine article “The Bad Superintendent” by Robert Kolker
Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt for “First Cow” based on the novel “The Half-Life” by Jon Raymond
Screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson and playwright August Wilson for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
Chloé Zhao for “Nomadland” based on the nonfiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” by Jessica Bruder
Screenwriter and playwright Kemp Powers for “One Night in Miami”
TV nominations
“The Good Lord Bird”—Showtime and Riverhead Books
“Normal People”—Hulu and Random House
“The Plot Against America”—HBO and Vintage International
“The Queen’s Gambit”—Netflix and Vintage Contemporaries
“Unorthodox”— Netflix and Simon & Schuster