If You Want To Study A Great Screenplay, Just Look To The 2025 Oscar Winners

The 97th Academy Awards put on a good show of honoring each vital part of filmmaking, treating costume design with the same importance as any director or actor. The ceremony's screenplay winners also show some respect for a key building-block of cinema: "the script, the script, and the script," to quote Alfred Hitchcock.

Writer-director Sean Baker's drama "Anora" won Best Original Screenplay, while Peter Straughan won Best Adapted Screenplay for adapting Robert Harris' novel "Conclave" to the screen (directed by Edward Berger). These are two very different films, but both excellent and signs of enduring life in the film industry. Both films also netted Best Picture nominations and ranked high on /Film's list of all 10 nominees.

"Anora" is about a young New York City sex worker Ani (Mikey Madison) who becomes the mistress, and then wife, of Vanya, a Russian oligarch's failson (Mark Eydelshteyn). "Conclave" follows a papal election after the death of the reigning Pope; Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) sniffs out corruption as this nest of snakes begin slashing for the top spot.

"Conclave" is a conventional drama about those in the halls of power. "Anora" uses Baker's trademark earthy, borderline cinema verite style. But here's how both screenplays succeed on their own terms.

The greatest task a screenplay must succeed at is making you care for its main character. "Anora" absolutely passes that test, for Ani's one of the funniest, saddest, and most unforgettable characters I've seen in a new film this year. She absolutely deserves to have the picture named after her.

The premise of "Anora" is simple yet subversive; it's a modern-day Cinderella story. Ani calls out this comparison herself, but not in a cheesy, self-referential way. She's just basking in her good luck and glowing that, for once in her life, she can really feel like a princess.

In the original "Cinderella," our heroine was someone cast down to the bottom of society by a cruel stepmother. Baker makes his Cinderella part of a disregarded class; a sex worker, but by putting you in Ani's shoes, the movie demands you empathize with her. People, as a whole, often struggle to see sex workers as humans, but "Anora" explores the whole life of one.

But, this "Cinderella" does not have a happy ending. Vanya's parents learn about his green card marriage (he and Anora are in a mutually transactional relationship) and demand they break it up. The second half of "Anora" confines itself to an under 48 hour timeframe, as Ani and Vanya's guardians search New York for him. This section has the pace of a screwball comedy, with the characters meeting misfortune after misfortune. The film's structure mirrors the type of whirlwind romance being depicted; all high at the beginning, but the high can't last.

Though Madison's performance completes Ani, it's only breathing life into what was there on the page.

It makes sense that "Conclave" took home the Best Adapted Screenplay. It's the most conventional nominee after music biopic "A Complete Unknown," but that's not a slight; "Conclave" is an exempli gratia of basic craft and the kind of thrillers Hollywood should be making more of.

There's not actually a murder in "Conclave," but the story has the vibe of a murder mystery; characters locked in a room, multiple suspects, and a single virtuous detective sewing threads together into answers. Setting such a story inside a papal conclave? A stroke of pulpy genius; you're hooked to know not just the truth, but also who will win the election and become the new Pope.

"Conclave" the novel is an old-fashioned page-turner, and the movie shows how to tell a story like that without any physical pages for the audience to turn. Oh sure, there's some surface-level changes. To accommodate the English Ralph Fiennes, Cardinal Lomeli is changed into Cardinal Lawrence. But scene for scene, the script is the book.

When a writer is adapting a work, it's impressive when they can make cuts or rearrangements yet still get the story right. Yet with "Conclave," Straughan sees no need for that. He doesn't just adapt the novel, he translates it — the script is as juicy to see acted out as it is to soak it up by reading the book.