USC Scripter Awards Finalists 2024 — See the Full List

The USC Libraries has revealed the finalists for the 36th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award, which honors the year’s best film and television adaptations, as well as the works on which they are based. This group of academics, industry professionals, and critics (for which I vote) is often predictive of the Adapted Screenplay Oscar race.

Last year, screenwriter Sarah Polley and novelist Miriam Toews won the film award for “Women Talking,” which was nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay Oscars; Polley won for Adapted at the Academy Awards. Meanwhile, the television prize last year went to English stand-up comedian and screenwriter Will Smith for the episode “Failure’s Contagious,” from “Slow Horses,” based on the novel by Mick Herron. Past winners include “Call Me By Your Name,” “Moonlight,” “The Big Short,” and “The Imitation Game,” which all won Oscars. In fact, before 2019, eight Scripter Award winners went on to win Oscars.

The finalist writers for film adaptation are here, in alphabetical order by film title:

▪ Cord Jefferson for “American Fiction,” based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett
▪ Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” based on the nonfiction book “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” by David Grann
▪ Christopher Nolan for “Oppenheimer,” based on the nonfiction book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and…