USC Scripter Awards: ‘Origin’ Among Five Nominees for Best Film Adaptation

Origin, a film with a script by Ava DuVernay that was inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, broke through with a nomination for the USC Scripter Award for best film adaptation, the USC Libraries revealed on Wednesday.

Origin will compete for the honor against four higher-profile Oscar contenders: American Fiction (Cord Jefferson’s adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure); Killers of the Flower Moon (Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI); Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer); and Poor Things (Tony McNamara’s adaptation of Aliasdair Gray’s novel of the same name).

Meanwhile, the finalists for best TV adaptation are the episode of Netflix’s The Crown entitled “Sleep, Dearie Sleep” (adapted by Peter Morgan from his his stage play The Audience); the episode of Prime Video’s Daisy Jones and the Six entitled “Fire” (adapted by Scott Neustadter from the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid); the episode of HBO Max’s The Last of Us entitled “Long, Long Time” (adapted by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin from the video game by Druckmann and Naughty Dog); the episode of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses entitled “Negotiating with Tigers” (adapted by Will Smith from Mick Herron’s novel Real Tigers); and the episode of HBO Max’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty entitled “The New World” (adapted by Rodney Barnes, Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht from Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s).

The 36th annual Scripter Awards will take place on Saturday, March 2, in the historic Edward. L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library on the campus of the University of Southern California.

The selection committee is again being chaired by USC professor Howard Rodman, who is also currently a vice president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.