Nomadland and The Queen’s Gambit took top honors at the 33rd annual — and first virtual — USC Libraries Scripter Awards on Saturday night.
The Scripter Awards celebrate the best printed-word-to-screen adaptations. Both authors and screenwriters were celebrated. Therefore, Nomadland screenwriter Chloe Zhao and Jesssica Bruder, the author of the novel of the same name, shared the film award, and the TV award went to both Scott Frank, who wrote the “Openings” episode of Queen’s Gambit, and Walter Tevis’ novel that inspired the Netflix series.
The other film nominees included Bad Education (Mike Makowsky’s reinterpretation of Robert Kolker’s New York magazine article “The Bad Superintendent”); First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, from Jon Raymond’s novel The Half-Life); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Ruben Santiago Hudson’s version of the late August Wilson’s play of the same name); and One Night in Miami (Kemp Powers take on his own play of the same name).
Meanwhile, the other nominees for the episodic TV Scripter Award (which was only introduced in 2016), were The Good Lord Bird (for the episode “Meet the Lord,” written by Mark Richard and Ethan Hawke from James McBride’s novel of the same name); Normal People (the fifth episode, written by Sally Rooney and Alice Birch, from Rooney’s novel); The Plot Against America (Ed Burns and David Simon’s sixth episode, based on the novel by Philip Roth); or Unorthodox (the first episode, written by Anna Winger, from Deborah Feldman’s autobiography of the same name).
The Scripter Award and the best adapted screenplay Oscar have gone to the same project on 14 occasions over the past 32 years.
The Scripter Award and the best-adapted screenplay Oscar have gone to the same project on 14 occasions over the past 32 years: Schindler’s List (1993), Sense and Sensibility (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), A Beautiful Mind (2001), 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).
