Latest in American Fiction

This is fact: Oscar-winning American Fiction screenwriter Cord Jefferson will receive the WGA West’s 2024 Paul Selvin Award next month. The first-time feature scribe will be feted during the West Coast ceremony for strike-delayed 77th Writers Guild Awards on April 14 at the Hollywood Palladium. He…

Looks like fourth time is truly a charm for Jimmy Kimmel and the Academy Awards. Back hosting the Oscars for the second year in a row and the fourth time overall, the ABC Late Night front man took a show where most of the big winners were pretty predictable and gave it some much needed bite. "See…

Cord Jefferson won at the Oscars on Sunday, taking home the award for Best Adapted Screenplay for American Fiction.  Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, the film straddled the line between drama and satire to depict social commentary on microaggression and pigeonholing of Black creatives…

American Fiction‘s Cord Jefferson is officially an Oscar winner — and he’s pleading with Hollywood studios to give more up and coming creatives a shot at their own golden statuette. While accepting the award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 96th Academy Awards, Jefferson used his speech to…

Julio Torres's directorial debut Problemista from A24 posted the highest per-screen average of the weekend with a solid limited opening, grossing $140.9k on five screens in New York and LA with multiple sold out Q&As. The film starring Torres and Tilda Swinton saw a PSA of $28k and strong exits at…

The 36th annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards on Saturday named Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction its outstanding film adaptations, giving the Oscar-nominated script a boost leading into next weekend’s Academy Awards. Apple TV+’s Slow Horses won in the episodic series category for a second year in a…

The 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards on Sunday awarded A24’s Past Lives its Best Feature and the film’s Celine Song the Best Director in a ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica, giving the indie romantic drama a boost as it heads toward the Oscars where it is up for Best Picture. Past Lives topped…

Prior to American Fiction, Sterling K. Brown was best known as Randall Pearson in the long-running, award-winning NBC family drama series This is Us. The part that director Cord Jefferson was offering him couldn't have been more different: in Jefferson's adaptation of the satirical novel by Percival…

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit. “Happy first day of voting,” a publicist told me over the phone late Thursday afternoon while still pitching last-minute interviews before final Oscar ballots are due back on Tuesday. I didn’t realize the first day of voting was…

To Cord Jefferson, jazz has always felt like “the sound of home.” So when thinking about the score for his first feature, American Fiction, where family was very much front and center, he felt there could be no more appropriate genre of music on which to draw. “I grew up in a household where jazz was…

I share my colleague Pete Hammond's fascination with Cord Jefferson's BAFTA win for his screenplay adaptation, American Fiction. It is no small thing for a self-consciously American story to win a very British award against competition as formidable as Christopher Nolan, especially for a debut…

Jeffrey Wright is no stranger to awards. He’s won an Emmy, a Tony and a Golden Globe all in fact for playing the same role: Nurse Belize in Angels In America, first on Broadway and then for the HBO limited series directed by Mike Nichols. Now he has his…