‘Nickel Boys’ writers Ross and Barnes set for WGAW Paul Selvin Award

Nickel Boys co-writers RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes have been named recipients of this year’s Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) Paul Selvin Award. 

Ross, who also directed the film, will accept the award on behalf of the duo at the Writers Guild Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on February 15. 

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys tells the story of an African-American high school student wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. The film is nominated for this year’s best picture Oscar and two Independent Spirit awards. Ross and Barnes are themselves up for the adapted screenplay Oscar and the adapted screenplay WGA Award. 

Named for the WGAW’s longtime general counsel, the Paul Selvin award is given to Guild members “whose script best embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties that are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere.” 

Barnes commented: “It’s a huge honour 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.” 

Ross said: “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.”

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