WGA Awards: Anora, Nickel Boys, Shōgun take home top honors

Sean Baker and Anora are continuing their run with guilds, as the movie has taken home Best Original Screenplay at the WGA Awards following huge wins with both the Directors Guild of America and Producers Guild of America. On the Adapted Screenplay front, RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes won for Nickel Boys.

But the WGA Awards are hardly the most reliable barometer for the Academy Awards. In fact, since 2010, the matching winners have pretty much always been in alternating years save for the back-to-back victories of Parasite and Promising Young Woman. Notably, however, there is only one other competitor that Anora was up against at the WGAs that is also up for Best Original Screenplay: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, as Challengers, Civil War and My Old Ass were benched. Instead, the Best Original Screenplay Oscar nominees contain three replacements that were ineligible for the WGAs: The Brutalist, September 5 and The Substance. Personally, I’m pulling for The Substance…

Showing he’s not taking himself too seriously on the awards circuit, during his acceptance speech, Baker noted that he was so inspired by Oliver Stone’s screenplay for Scarface that he made it a goal to top its “f bomb” count, which he proudly did, as Anora contains a reported 449 uses.

As far as Best Adapted Screenplay goes, Nickel Boys – which is based on Colson Whitehead’s novel – also has only one movie in competition at the Oscars that was also nominated for the WGA Award: A Complete Unknown. Again, it can be a hard category to predict because of situations like this, primarily tied to writers agreements and individuals not being in the union itself.

More predictable was that Shōgun and Hacks would be top winners in the TV categories, as they have been awards behemoths. Shōgun ended up taking home three WGA Awards, including Drama Series and New Series, while Hacks took Comedy Series and one for “Bulletproof.”

Best Documentary Screenplay went to Jim Henson: Idea Man, written by Mark Monroe, its most prominent competition being R.J. Cutler’s Martha, which faced criticism for its writing and direction from Martha Stewart herself.

You can see the full list of winners for the 77th WGA Awards here.