Apatow, Cody, Penn among WGA script noms
NEW YORK – While the Writers Guild of America continues its strike, throwing much of awards season into question, it still has some awards of its own to hand out.
The WGA on Thursday announced its nominees for the most outstanding achievements in writing for the screen in the past year. Among the nominees for best original screenplay were stripper-turned-scribe Diablo Cody for the teen pregnancy comedy “Juno,” and Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed “Michael Clayton,” about a fixer at an upscale New York law firm.
Also nominated for best original screenplay were Judd Apatow for “Knocked Up,” another comedy about an unplanned pregnancy; Tamara Jenkins for “The Savages,” about adult siblings caring for their ailing father, and Nancy Oliver for “Lars and the Real Girl,” in which a loner falls for a life-size doll.
Many of the year’s most acclaimed films were based on books, making the adapted screenplay category especially competitive. The nominees include Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas crime novel, “No Country for Old Men,” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel “Oil!” ó which he turned into “There Will Be Blood.”
Also nominated for best adapted screenplay were Sean Penn’s script for “Into the Wild,” based on Jon Krakauer’s book, Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” and James Vanderbilt’s script for “Zodiac,” adapted from Robert Graysmith’s book about San Francisco’s Zodiac killer.
Nominees for the third and final category, documentary screenplay, were Michael Moore’s script for “Sicko,” as well as those for “Nanking,” “No End in Sight,” “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “The Rape of Europa” and “The Camden 28.”
The Writers Guild Awards are set for Feb. 9 at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York.
The guild’s strike is causing considerable turmoil this awards season. On Monday, organizers facing the prospect of a Golden Globes ceremony without any celebrities ó who said they wouldn’t cross picket lines ó reduced the event to a news conference.
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