‘Anora’ & ‘Nickel Boys’ Win Best Screenplays at the 2025 WGA Awards
by Alex Billington
February 16, 2025
Source: WGA.org
With a few weeks left until the Academy Awards, almost all the big prizes for the 2025 awards season have been handed out, with only a few more left – next up are the biggest screenplay awards. The Writers Guild of America has announced the winners of the 2025 WGA Awards. Last year, the big WGA winners were The Holdovers (Original), written by David Hemingson, and American Fiction (Adapted), written by Cord Jefferson adapted from the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett. What have fellow writers determined to be the best scripts of 2024? The winners: Anora (Original), written by filmmaker Sean Baker, plus Nickel Boys (Adapted), written by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes; based on the book “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead. Mark Monroe also won the Best Documentary award for Jim Henson: Idea Man (on D+). I’m happy about all of the winners – Anora and Nickel Boys are two of my favorite films from 2025 anyway.
There were many fantastic scripts last year, it’s hard to choose just one winner among all of them. Which scripts do you think deserve awards? Which films have the best dialogue? The other WGA Awards nominees from 2024 for Best Original Screenplay were: Challengers, written by Justin Kuritzkes; Civil War, written by Alex Garland; My Old Ass, written by Megan Park; A Real Pain, written by Jesse Eisenberg. Any would’ve been a deserving winner. The other WGA Awards nominees from 2024 for Best Adapted were: A Complete Unknown, written by James Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on the book “Dylan Goes Electric!” by Elijah Wald; Dune: Part Two written by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on the novel “Dune” by Frank Herbert; Hit Man written by Richard Linklater and Glen Powell; based on the Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth; Wicked written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox; based on the musical stage play with music & lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winnie Holzman; based on the novel by Gregory Maguire.
On the documentary side, Jim Henson: Idea Man is good but not one of my faves. The other WGA Awards nominees from 2024 for Best Documentary were: Kiss the Future with a screenplay by Bill S. Carter, story by Bill S. Carter & Nenad Cicin-Sain; Martha with a screenplay by R. J. Cutler; War Game with a screenplay by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss. And in television, the WGA awarded Shogun for Best New & Best Drama Series (Shannon Goss, Maegan Houang, Rachel Kondo, Matt Lambert, Justin Marks, Caillin Puente, Nigel Williams, Emily Yoshida); Hacks for Best Comedy Series (Genevieve Aniello, Lucia Aniello, Guy Branum, Jessica Chaffin, Paul W. Downs, Jess Dweck, Ariel Karlin, Andrew Law, Carol Leifer, Carolyn Lipka, Joe Mande, Aisha Muharrar, Pat Regan, Samantha Riley, Jen Statsky); and The Penguin for Best Limited Series (Vladimir Cvetko, Breannah Gibson, Erika L. Johnson, Lauren LeFranc, Corina Maritescu, Megan Martin, John McCutcheon, Shaye Ogbonna, Nick Towne, Noelle Valdivia, Kira Snyder). For the full list of winners in all categories, head to WGA.org. Onwards to the Oscars next! Congrats to all of the 2025 winners and noms.
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