90th Oscars screenplay nominees: ‘Logan’, ‘Molly’s Game’, ‘Disaster Artist’, ‘The Big Sick’

“Logan,” directed by Mangold and starring Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart, was one of the best-received action movies of 2017 and has a 93 percent approval rating on reviews website Rotten Tomatoes. © 20th Century Fox through AFP

Superhero movie “Logan”, high-stakes poker thriller “Molly’s Game”, bad movie homage “The Disaster Artist” and romantic comedy “The Big Sick” get invitations to the 90th Oscars courtesy of screenplay nominations.

Four of 2018’s ten Oscar nominees for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay make it through to the March 4 ceremony entirely on the strength of their scripts.

“Logan” is one of only two comic book movies at the Academy Awards and makes it without dependence on the superhero genre’s usual home in Best Visual Effects (where “Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2” resides).

Instead, “Logan” director James Mangold and the movie’s two other writers will be attending as nominees in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay.

There they join Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed “Molly’s Game”, Dee Rees who co-wrote and directed “Mudbound”, and the writers on “Call Me by Your Name” and “The Disaster Artist”.

In Best Original Screenplay, “The Big Sick” writers Emily V. Gordon and Kumal Nanjiani star in their film rather than direct it.

By contrast, treatments for “Get Out”, “Lady Bird”, “The Shape of Water” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” were all written by those film’s respective directors.

Nine out of ten screenplay nominees were previously put forward for equivalent awards at the Writers Guild of America Awards on Feb. 11.

The WGAs are considered good indicators of consequent Oscar success: one of its two screenplay victors is usually both a Best Screenplay and then overall Best Picture recipient during the Academy Awards’ own do.

But “Three Billboards” is absent from the WGA’s draft and, on seven nods, has become one of the 90th Oscars’ most-nominated features behind only “Dunkirk” (8) and “The Shape of Water” (13); meaning that its exclusion from the WGAs shouldn’t necessarily exclude it from observers’ Oscar predictions. JB

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