“American Fiction,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Oppenheimer,” “Origin” and “Poor Things” have been named finalists for the 2024 USC Libraries Scripter Awards, an annual honor given to film and television adaptations and the works on which they are based.
In the television category, the finalists are episodes of “The Crown,” “Daisy Jones and the Six,” “The Last of Us,” “Slow Horses” and “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.”
Because the Scripter Awards honor both the screenwriter of an adaptation and the author of the original work, the nominees for “American Fiction” are writer-director Cord Jefferson and author Percival Everett, who wrote the 2001 novel “Erasure”; for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” screenwriters Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese and author David Grann, who wrote the 2017 nonfiction book “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI”; for “Oppenheimer,” writer-director Christopher Nolan and Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, authors of “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”; for “Origin,” writer-director Ava DuVernay and author Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote the 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; and for “Poor Things,” screenwriter Tony McNamara and the late Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray, who published the novel of that name in 1992.
Three of the television nominations were for writers who adapted books: “Daisy Jones and the Six” writer Scott Neustadter for the episode “Fire,” based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid; “Slow Horses” writer Will Smith for the episode “Negotiating With Tigers” from the adaptation of Mick Herron’s novel “Real Tigers”; and “Winning Time” screenwriters Max Borenstein, Rodney Barnes and Jim Hecht for the episode “The New World” from their adaptation of Jeff Perlman’s nonfiction book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s.”
Television nominee Peter Morgan, creator of “The Crown” and nominee for the episode “Sleep, Dearie Sleep,” shares the nomination with his own stage play, “The Audience.” And “The Last of Us” writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann are nominated for the episode “Long, Long Time” adapted from the video game by Druckmann and Naughty Dog.
The Scripter Awards were launched in 1988 and are chosen by a committee or writers, filmmakers, executives and academics that considered 80 film and 56 episodic series adaptations. Howard Rodman, a USC professor and governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences representing the Writers Branch, chaired the committee.
Over the first 35 years of the Scripter Awards, about 60% of its finalists have gone on to receive Oscar nominations in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. In that time, 15 Scripter winners have also won the Oscar. More than half of those wins came in an eight-year streak between 2010 and 2017.
This year’s Scripter finalists in the film category are for the most part strong contenders for Academy Award nominations, with “Origin” getting the biggest boost from the Scripters after being overlooked in most other awards this year. The Oscars adapted-screenplay category was thrown into some disarray, though, by the Academy’s decision to classify Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s “Barbie” as an adaptation because it is based on the preexisting doll. Most awards bodies have considered it an original screenplay.
The Scripter Awards winners will be announced on Saturday, March 2 in a ceremony at the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library on the USC campus in downtown Los Angeles.
