Cannes Winning Screenplays That Won’t Compete for WGA Awards: ‘Sentimental Value,’ ‘Secret Agent,’ and ‘It Was Just An Accident’
In a significant oversight, numerous acclaimed films vying for this year’s Oscar nominations are absent from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Awards ballot. The guild’s stringent eligibility criteria have left many celebrated screenplays off the list distributed to its members on Tuesday.
Notable among the absent original screenplays are the Cannes Film Festival winners and multiple Golden Globe nominees, including Sentimental Value, It Was Just an Accident, The Secret Agent, and Sirāt. Each of these films serves as an official Academy Award International Film entry and has gained traction in screenplay nomination predictions on Gold Derby. Additional missing titles include Father Mother Sister Brother, the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner directed by Jim Jarmusch, and Sorry, Baby, A24’s Sundance Film Festival honoree recognized both at the Indie Spirit Awards and by various critics’ groups for Eva Victor’s inaugural script.
Clockwise from top left: ‘It Was Just an Accident,’ ‘No Other Choice,’ ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ ‘Sentimental Value’ and ‘The Secret Agent’ Neon/Netflix
Additional original screenplays omitted from the WGA ballot include Rental Family, Dead Man’s Wire, A Private Life, Rosemead, and Robert Kaplow’s widely praised script for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. Notably, Linklater’s other 2025 film, Nouvelle Vague, did qualify for the ballot despite being a high-profile foreign-language project.
Among adapted screenplays absent from consideration are Park Chan-Wook’s highly regarded South Korean Oscar entry No Other Choice, along with the Cannes Un Certain Regard-winning Pillion, The History of Sound, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Ballad of a Small Player. Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water is also missing, as is Peter Hujar’s Day, a script recently nominated for the prestigious USC Scripter Award. However, the horror genre finds representation on the ballot with titles such as M3gan 2.0 and Black Phone 2.
Additionally, the screenplay for Rob Reiner’s final film, Spinal Tap II, co-written by Reiner, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean, is eligible for Adapted Screenplay consideration.
The Writers Guild of America stipulates that screenplays must adhere to specific eligibility requirements, emphasizing that they must have been written under a WGA collective bargaining agreement or a corresponding agreement from designated affiliate guilds. Additionally, formal submission of scripts is mandatory, even for those that may be eligible.
Nomination ballots for the WGA Awards are due back on January 20. The nominees across film and television categories will be announced on January 27, followed by the awards ceremony set for March 8.
