Greta Gerwig has won the Scripter Award for the best book-to-screen adaptation of 2019 for “Little Women,” an honor she shares with author Louisa May Alcott, who died in 1888, almost half a century before Hollywood ever thought about giving out awards.
The Scripter Award, which is handed out by USC Libraries, goes both to the original author of a work and to the screenwriter who adapted it, making Gerwig and Alcott co-winners of the prize.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge won the TV award for the first episode of “Fleabag.” The show was based on her one-woman play of the same name, which means she doesn’t have to share the Scripter with any other authors, living or dead.
The winners were chosen by a selection committee of critics, authors, screenwriters, producers and academics chaired by USC professor and former WGA, West president Howard Rodman.
Although the Scripter Award was launched in 1988 as a somewhat idiosyncratic award with a literary bent, it had become one of the most reliable Oscar predictors over the last 13 years, when 11 of its winners — including eight in a row — went on to win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. (Before that, in the first 19 years of Scripter’s existence, the winners only matched four times.)
That eight-year Scripter streak of predicting the Oscar winner came to an end last year, when “Leave No Trace” won the Scripter but was not nominated by the Academy. Four of this year’s Scripter nominees — “The Irishman,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Little Women” and “The Two Popes” — were also nominated for Oscars, with the fifth slot going to “Dark Waters” at the Scripters and “Joker” at the Oscars.
The ceremony took place in the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library on the USC campus.