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Considerations
Covering the annual film industry awards races, with sharp commentary on the pictures, the players, the money and the spectacle. by Tyler Coates
Considering the Oscar Best Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay Categories
Challengers (©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection) At this stage in the season, when it is entirely too early to make any meaningful predictions about what the Oscar nominees (much less the winners) will be, I like to look back at the Academy’s recent history to identify trends that can give us an idea of what voters are into, generally speaking.
It’s not an exact science, of course — the contenders are drastically different every season — but there is one trend that I’ve noticed shaking out over the last decade or so: The Oscars for best original screenplay and best adapted screenplay are more likely to go to a director, either with a solo screenwriting credit or as part of a writing team.
Let’s look at the last 10 winners of the Oscar for best original screenplay:
2014: Spike Jonze, Her
2015: Armando Bo, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., Nicolás Giacobone and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Birdman
2016: Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy, Spotlight
2017: Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea
2018: Jordan Peele, Get Out
2019: Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga, Green Book
2020: Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-wan, Parasite
2021: Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman
2022: Kenneth Branagh, Belfast
2023: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once
2024: Arthur Harari and Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall
And the winners during the same period in the adapted category:
2014: John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave
2015: Graham Moore, The Imitation Game
2016: Charles Randolph and Adam McKay, The Big Short
2017: Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCrane, Moonlight
2018: James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name
2019: Spike Lee, David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel and Kevin Willmott, BlacKKKlansman
2020: Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit
2021: Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller, The Father
2022: Sian Heder, CODA
2023: Sarah Polley, Women Talking
2024: Cord Jefferson, American Fiction
Among those 20 wins, only three Oscars went to individual screenwriters who did not also direct their movies: John Ridley for 12 Years a Slave, Graham Moore for The Imitation Game and James Ivory for Call Me by Your Name — all in the adapted screenplay category. It’s notable that Ivory’s win was for his fourth career nom, having earned best director nominations for A Room with a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day; it’s also astounding that Spike Lee’s first Oscar win for BlacKKKlansman was shared with three other people.
Meanwhile, the most recent non-director to win best original screenplay was David Seidler for The King’s Speech in 2011 — the last in a five-year streak of that Oscar going to scripts not written by the respective films’ directors, which also included The Hurt Locker in 2010, Milk in 2009, Juno in 2009 and Little Miss Sunshine in 2008.
Now, I won’t be so bold to suggest there’s some conspiracy afoot in which voters have rallied together to favor writer-directors over writers, but it’s also interesting to me how rarely the best director winners overlap with either of the screenplay prizes: three times in the last decade (Birdman, Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once) and 14 times in the Academy Awards’ 96-year history (Billy Wilder was the first to win both for The Lost Weekend at the 19th Oscars ceremony in 1946). The voters’ recent tendency to reward directors in these categories have made the screenplay Oscars feel like “best director junior” — not exactly a consolation prize, but still a recognition of these filmmakers’ merits beyond simply writing.
So now is when I make my first prediction of the season — and don’t worry, I’m keeping myself safe from potential embarrassment in March by being pretty broad here: It’s likely that whoever wins best director will not win either of the screenplay categories, but it’s even more likely that the winners in the latter categories will have directed their own scripts.
Regarding the latter prediction, the odds are actually in my favor — among the major screenplay contenders, only a handful were not scripted by their directors. That crop includes Briarcliff Entertainment’s The Apprentice, written by journalist-turned-screenwriter Gabriel Sherman; Focus Features’s Conclave, adapted by the Robert Harris novel by Peter Straughan (a previous nominee for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy); and Netflix’s Callas biopic Maria, written by Steven Knight (also previously nominated for Dirty Pretty Things).
One contender to watch this season is Justin Kuritzkes, who has both an original and an adapted screenplay in contention with Challengers (Amazon MGM Studios) and Queer (A24), respectively, both helmed by Luca Guadagnino. I bring up Kuritzkes not just because he has two features; I also keep imagining an alternate timeline in which Challengers hit theaters as intended last fall before Amazon bumped the release amid the WGA/SAG strikes. If it had been released as planned, we could have seen a face-off in the original screenplay race between Kuritzkes and his wife Celine Song, the writer-director of Past Lives. I think that’s two too many love triangles for a single Oscar category, much less one marriage.
Naturally, there is a glut of original and adapted screenplays written by (solo or as a writing team) their directors in both categories. In the original screenplay race, the frontrunners include Sean Baker for Anora (NEON), Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold for The Brutalist (A24), Jacques Audiard for Emilia Pérez (Netflix), Jesse Eisenberg for A Real Pain(Searchlight) and Coralie Fargeat for The Substance (MUBI) — all of whom could earn their first Oscar nods. And the category could welcome returning Oscar nominees (and one winner) with the latest from Steve McQueen (Apple’s Blitz), Mike Leigh (Bleecker Street’s Hard Truths) and Jason Reitman (Sony’s Saturday Night, co-written with Gil Kenan).
The adapted screenplay category may also boast some previous nominees aiming for their first Oscar, among them Jay Cocks and James Mangold for A Complete Unknown (Searchlight), Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts for Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros.) and Pedro Almodóvar for The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures Classics). Joslyn Barnes, previously nominated alongside director Dee Rees for Mudbound, is also a contender with director RaMell Ross for Amazon/MGM’s Nickel Boys.
One final thing to note: There aren’t a lot of women among the writing contenders this year, with just The Brutalist’s Mona Fastvold, Nickel Boys’s Joslyn Barnes and The Substance’s Carolie Fargeat among the frontrunners. There’s also A24’s Babygirl, written and directed by Halina Reijn; Searchlight’s Nightbitch, written and directed by Marielle Heller; and Sony Pictures Classics’ The Outrun, written by director Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot. But those features are building more buzz for the lead performances from Nicole Kidman, Amy Adams and Saorise Ronan, respectively; similarly, Disney’s Inside Out 2, written by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, is a stronger contender for animated feature despite its predecessor nabbing an original screenplay nom (the sequel, under Academy rules, will be submitted as an adapted screenplay).
Similarly, this sets up a particularly male-heavy best director lineup, with Fargeat at the moment the strongest player to advance in that space. In 76 years, only eight women have been nominated for best director, and three have won. It’s already looking like this year will be a continuation of that disparity.
