Oscars 2026 Winners: Best Script and Best Adapted Script Review

On March 15th, 2026, the Dolby Theatre welcomed, for the second year in a row, Conan O'Brien and the longest, most expensive, and most watched event in the world that doesn't involve a ball of some sort. The 98th Academy Awards were watched by 17.9 million viewers on ABC and Hulu, which is 9% less than last year. This is, of course, the end of the world. Or people simply found out that they can watch the best speeches on TikTok at 11 P.M. and just skip the three hours of red carpet and filler moments.

As for the films themselves, the night was dominated by Warner Bros, and different Warner Bros titles often competed against each other. Sinners, by Ryan Coogler, broke a historic record with 16 nominations and 4 awards, including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan and Best Original Script for Coogler himself. One Battle After Another, by Paul Thomas Anderson, won Best Feature, Best Director, Best Adapted Script, and three other awards, so it was the biggest winner of the night. This director was nominated 14 times throughout the years but had never won until now.

Today, we'll discuss these two scripts in detail. When we go through what's written on the page before the cameras roll, the editors add in the IMAX treatment, and the cast puts their spin on the words, what we find is a pretty honest picture of what American cinema is like today.

A Script With No Small Roles

Sinners is set in 1932, Mississipi, during the Jim Crow era. The twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan as both) return to their hometown after years working for Al Capone in Chicago. Their goal is to open a juke joint and begin anew. What they get is a night of blues, dancing, vampires, and their imperialist agenda.

What stands out in Coogler's script, before anything else, is that there are no "decorative" characters. All side characters do more than just push the protagonists forward. Delta Slim has his own story. Annie has her own story. Remmick himself, the Irish vampire played by Jack O'Connell, is motivated enough that his arguments sound, for a disturbing amount of time, almost logical. Each side character breathes on their own because the script treats all of them as people, not as narrative devices.

This decision directly affects the pacing. When any character comes onto the screen, the audience gets invested. Danger is not abstract. Loss is not merely "decorative".

Music as a Narrative Device

Coogler mentioned in interviews that he wanted to make a movie that went against the concept of genre. And that's exactly what this script does, without asking for permission, in its most iconic scene: when Sammie starts playing blues and the music literally tears time apart.

What happens in this scene is structurally bold. The story stops. The linear logic that carries this thriller forward is suspended. And, for several minutes, the script delivers a sequence that is, simultaneously, a performance, a metaphor, a historical argument, and a spiritual act. Blues pulses through the ground. Characters from different generations share the same space. Music acts as a portal between the living and the dead, the past and the present, what was stolen and what remains.

And that's not just for show. It's the heart of the film, exposed and delivered on a platter. Instead of explaining the metaphor, the script performs it. And, by doing that, Coogler does something many blockbuster scriptwriters are afraid to do: he trusts that the audience can handle a scene that doesn't exactly advance the plot, that sometimes the story can breathe by itself, and that delirium and experimentation have space in a script.

The Good and Evil, Scriptless

Sinners is not about heroes. Smoke and Stack came back from the front and then worked for gangsters. They did things the script doesn't forgive them for, and the title of the movie itself is an admission of guilt.

What the script does, very intelligently at that, is establish the dichotomy between good and evil as a starting point and then subvert it. Vampires promise equality: once everyone is bitten, no one can oppress anyone. It's an offer that follows some internal logic. And the fact that Remmick uses an Irish song to @@@@ his victims, putting a colonizer's song in opposition to blues, reveals a layer of the script that goes way beyond horror as a genre.

The metaphor isn't subtle because it doesn't have to be. Vampires that suck blood and turn what was once significant to a community into something else, something meaningless, all while absorbing their culture, is perfectly understandable even without any academic study. They're visceral horror elements and a political argument at the same time, and the script is competent enough to sustain both representations.

Ryan Coogler was awarded an Oscar for Best Original Script, and it was the right award for the right movie. He was also the second black scriptwriter to win, after Jordan Peele. And it was well-deserved.

What Works

One Battle After Another follows Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ex-revolutionary living off-grid, as he raises his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). The past returns when Coronel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a corrupt military man from other days, reappears just as Willa disappears. What follows is a 161-minute pursuit that is an action thriller, a comedy of errors, and misplaced political commentary. Yes, it's almost a copy of Finding Nemo.

The first thirty minutes are almost an expanded prologue: a narrative preface that establishes the tone, the humor, and the universe before the story itself actually begins. It's a brave structural choice, and it works because the director has already conquered the right to make the audience wait. DiCaprio is convincing as an exhausted father. Sean Penn is evil and vulnerable in a way that makes Lockjaw more than just a standard villain. Benicio del Toro steals the spotlight without even trying.

The pacing, when the movie takes off for good, is just right. The twists are relevant. The script knows when to build tension without relying solely on physical action, and the lines are full of sharp irony, the director's trademark.

The Problem With Revolution

This is where the tension is.

One Battle After Another is, in theory, a movie about resilience, about what remains of a generation that believed in something and saw that something get devoured by time and decay. It should be angry, and it often is.

But the script often trips into stereotypes that seem more like mistakes than deliberate choices. Female characters that exist solely to push the men around them forward. Representations that are almost caricatures when the text needed complexity. Some revolutionary figures are treated with such irony and so easily that it almost sounds condescending. The result is that, in some moments, the movie seems to mock the cause it was supposed to defend.

This mistake doesn't destroy the movie completely, but it weakens it. And, considering the main argument in One Battle After Another is precisely the legacy a generation leaves for the future, these mistakes matter more than they would in another context.

PTA and Pynchon: How You Adapt a Script

Thomas Pynchon is 88 years old and has a wide archive full of critical pieces. His stories are dense, bold, full of ninjas, conspiracies, ghosts, and characters with names that seem to have come out of fever dreams. The book that inspired One Battle After Another, Vineland (1990), is considered the most accessible Pynchon work by academics. This, on the Pynchon scale, is like saying that this is the least destructive hurricane.

PTA has loved this author for decades. In 2014, he adapted Inherent Vice, another Pynchon work, so faithfully and with such devotion that the spirt of the text could be felt in every scene. One Battle After Another is different: it is a bit more flexible. PTA transformed the original work into an action thriller that big audiences can watch and understand relatively easily.

What PTA managed to do, a genuinely difficult task, was to preserve the political tones and corrosive humor that mark Pynchon works and also translate his narrative architecture into a language the movie industry can sustain. The pieces in the novel that stray off course and deliberately lose themselves from the main story became choices. And each of these choices revealed that the scriptwriter deeply understood what actually matters in the original work.

The 98th Academy Awards celebrated two scripts that work, each in their own way, as a litmus test.

Sinners represents something Hollywood is rarely brave enough to do with all the money it gets: it's original, deeply rooted in Black American history, structurally bold, uses music as an argument, and has an impeccable protagonist. It's a blockbuster feature that doesn't play out like one. It trusts the audience. And it won an Oscar that usually goes to a nothing burger (often tasty, but always empty).

One Battle After Another represents something else, something just as real: how American movies can "tame" original works that are often considered inaccessible by literary critics. The biggest movie studio in the world transformed Pynchon into a film that still has its own opinions and structure.

Together, they paint two sides of the same coin. American scripts, in 2026, might still have something to say. The question is how many Cooglers and PTAs the system can spit out before it returns to sequels, expanded universes, and neverending franchises. For now, the answer is: at least one. Which is more than none.

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Thank you for reading, and see you next time!