Nickel Boys co-writers RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes have been named recipients of this 12 months’s Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) Paul Selvin Award.
Ross, who additionally directed the movie, will settle for the award on behalf of the duo on the Writers Guild Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on February 15.
Based mostly on the Pulitzer Prize-winning ebook by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys tells the story of an African-American highschool scholar wrongfully convicted of a criminal offense and despatched to a reform college in Jim Crow-era Florida. The movie is nominated for this 12 months’s finest image Oscar and two Unbiased Spirit awards. Ross and Barnes are themselves up for the tailored screenplay Oscar and the tailored screenplay WGA Award.
Named for the WGAW’s longtime normal counsel, the Paul Selvin award is given to Guild members “whose script finest embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties which are indispensable to the survival of free writers in all places.”
Barnes commented: “It’s an enormous honour to be awarded this specific award particularly given the place we’re on this planet proper now with disinformation and misinformation being very intentionally created to maintain individuals in a sort of everlasting state of disaster.”
Ross mentioned: “Joslyn and I needed to take a grand visible strategy wherein you’re contending with one thing so basically true, however you’re not being informed it, you’re witnessing it your self.”