It’s that time of year once again, folks, as America’s competitive instincts come to their ultimate apex in a single, glorious night of quietly voting on whose film and television scripts they liked the most. That’s right: The Writers Guild Of America Awards were held tonight, a.k.a. the “Big Game” of arguments about the definition of “adapted” versus original screenplays, and why Greta Gerwig should win for all of them. As the annual WGA Awards parties and tailgates rage, we’ll be serving up wall-to-wall coverage of the event, with our reviews and rankings of all the hottest WGA ads, teasers for ads, and trailers for the teasers for ads coming later this evening—to say nothing of our second-by-second coverage of the event’s flamboyant half-time show, in which flaming screenplays are juggled until no survivors are left. But for now, let’s get to the results we’ve all been waiting for: The winners of this year’s ultimate showdown of people who write good for wot goes up on the screen.
First up, in film, we’ve got a Parasite/Jojo Rabbit double feature, with Bong Joon ho and Han Jin Won winning for Original Screenplay for their twisting class conflict story, and Taika Waititi pulled in the honor for adaptation—beating out both Joker and Little Women, because you really never can underestimate a Holocaust story when awards season comes around. Meanwhile, over in longform TV, it was a fantastic night for HBO, as the network ran circles around its competitors, winning in Comedy Series (Barry), Episodic Drama (Succession), Long Form Original (Chernobyl), Documentary Screenplay (The Inventor), and Drama Series (Succession, again). (Which also makes it a big night for writers Alec Berg, Duffy Boudreau, Bill Hader, Emily Heller, Jason Kim, Taofik Kolade, and Elizabeth Sarnoff; Will Tracy; Craig Mazin; Alex Gibney; and Jesse Armstrong, Alice Birch, Jon Brown, Jonathan Glatzer, Cord Jefferson, Mary Laws, Lucy Prebble, Georgia Pritchett, Tony Roche, Gary Shteyngart, and Susan Soon He Stanton, respectively.) Oh, and, Comedy/Variety Talk (Last Week Tonight) and New Series (Watchmen). Like we said: Big night.
Non-Home Box Office winners from the night’s awards include wins for Netflix and FX , with Liz Feldman scoring an Episodic Comedy win for Dead To Me, and Fosse/Verdon (Debora Cahn, Joel Fields, Ike Holter, Thomas Kail, Steven Levenson, Charlotte Stoudt, and Tracey Scott Wilson) recognized in Long Form Adapted. (Netflix also won for Ryan O’Connell’s Short Form New Media piece Special.) Oh, and Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave (rightly) beat out his former colleagues’ work on Saturday Night Live for Comedy/Variety Sketch Series.
In other wins: Samantha Bee’s Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner Part Two scored for Comedy/Variety special, while The Simpsons—somehow—beat out both Bob’s Burgers and BoJack Horseman with this year’s admittedly-above-average “Thanksgiving Of Horror.”
Anyway, now that America’s competitive spirit has been well and truly spent, we can’t imagine any more big battles will play out for the rest of the weekend. (Unless, again, we all collectively rise up to announce that Greta Gerwig got robbed.) Have a restful Sunday, everyone!
