WGA Preview

The Writers Guild will announce their nominees tomorrow. Kris Tapley has written a good rundown of how he thinks they will go. The WGA have shut out many of the year’s most acclaimed screenplays. But that doesn’t mean that those scripts won’t then be represented at the Oscars. Our chart has the WGA history compared to the Oscar. Last year, oddly enough, only Milk was nominated for and won the WGA and then went on to be nominated for an to win the Oscar for original screenplay. All of the other four were not nominated.

More after the cut.

Our FULL WGA-OSCAR chart is here.

won WGA | won Oscar

2008

2007

This year shouldn’t be too hard to call with so many taken out of the pool. There are some we can be sure are locks in this category – A Serious Man, The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air. They are locks and frontrunners for the WGA, which will make them locks and frontrunners for Oscar. The winners of these will likely be The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air. This will likely repeat at the Oscars.

But what of the nominees? Let’s take a look at adapted. These are Kris Tapley’s predictions:

Best Adapted Screenplay
“Crazy Heart” (Scott Cooper)
“Julie & Julia” (Nora Ephron)
“Invictus” (Anthony Peckham)
“Precious” (Geoffrey Fletcher)
“Up in the Air” (Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner)

They’re pretty spot on, probably. But I wouldn’t be surprised if any of these also showed up (jeez, there is really nothing left, is there?):

Star Trek
Where the Wild Things Are (eligible??)
Bright Star
The Informant!

Here are Kris’ predictions for Original:

Best Original Screenplay
“(500) Days of Summer” (Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber)
“Avatar” (James Cameron)
“The Hurt Locker” (Mark Boal)
“It’s Complicated” (Nancy Meyers)
“A Serious Man” (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen)

I don’t think the writers are going to go for Avatar – so I would swap out The Hangover with Avatar and keep the rest as is.