RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes will receive the Writers Guild of America West’s 2025 Paul Selvin Award for their work as the screenwriters of Nickel Boys, the Amazon MGM Studios drama they adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning book.
The honor will be bestowed during the guild’s WGA Awards on February 15 at the Beverly Hilton.
The award, named for the former WGAW general counsel and given each year to a member or members whose script best embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties, is the latest for the film and the duo. Ross made his narrative feature directorial debut for with the pic, which was nominated for a pair of Oscars: for the screenplay and for Best Picture.
Nickel Boys follows Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a high school student wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to the Nickel Academy reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida, where he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), another ward of the state. The bond between the two teenagers is a source of hope through the unspeakable abuse they experience there.
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The film’s screenplay is also up for the WGA’s Adapted Screenplay award and is a finalist for the USC Scripter Award which recognizes the screenwriters and the authors behind the original works.
“It’s a huge honor to be awarded this particular award especially given where we are in the world right now with disinformation and misinformation being very deliberately created to keep people in a kind of permanent state of crisis,” said Barnes in a release Friday from the WGA.
Added Ross: “Joslyn and I wanted to take a grand visual approach in which you’re contending with something so fundamentally true, but you’re not being told it, you’re witnessing it yourself.”
Previous Paul Selvin Award winners include Cord Jefferson for last year’s American Fiction, which went on to win the Oscar.
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