‘Jojo Rabbit,’ ‘Little Women,’ ‘Unbelievable,’ ‘Watchmen’ earn USC Scripter nominations

The nominations for the 32nd annual USC Scripter Award for best film and television adaptations were announced Wednesday morning by the USC Libraries and Jojo Rabbit, Little Women were among the film nominees while Unbelievable and Watchmen were nominated for TV. Finalists were selected from 61 film and 58 television adaptations.

Eight of the last 10 winners of the Scripter Award have gone on to win the Oscar for Adapted Screenplay: No Country for Old Men (2007), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), The Social Network (2010), The Descendants (2011), Argo (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013), The Imitation Game (2014), The Big Short (2015), Moonlight (2016) and Call Me by Your Name (2017). Interestingly, last year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar winner, BlacKkKlansman, was not nominated here first.

Unique to the Scripter Awards, unlike the Oscars, both the adapter and the adapted material authors are nominated and honored. The winners of both awards will be announced at a ceremony Saturday, January 25, at USC’s historical Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library.

Here is the full list of nominations.

Film

Matthew Carnahan and Mario Correa for Dark Waters based on the New York Times Magazine article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” by Nathaniel Rich

Steven Zaillian for The Irishman based on the nonfiction work I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt

Taika Waititi for JoJo Rabbit based on the novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens

Greta Gerwig for Little Women based on the novel of the same name by Louisa May Alcott

Anthony McCarten for The Two Popes based on his play The Pope

Television

Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the first episode of Fleabag based on her one-woman play of the same name

Joel Fields and Steven Levenson for the episode “Nowadays” from Fosse/Verdon based on the biography Fosse by Sam Wasson

Emerald Fennell for the episode “Nice and Neat” from Killing Eve based on the novel Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings

Susannah Grant, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman for the first episode of Unbelievable based on the article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong

Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson for the episode “This Extraordinary Being” from Watchmen based on the comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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