LOS ANGELES — Five individuals have been selected as winners of the 2019 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting (www.oscars.org) competition. The fellows will each receive a $35,000 prize, the first installment of which will be distributed at the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Awards Presentation & Live Read on Thursday, November 7th, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. For the seventh consecutive year, an ensemble of actors will read selected scenes from the winning scripts.
The 2019 winners are (listed alphabetically by author):
Aaron Chung, “Princess Vietnam”
Karen McDermott, “Lullabies of La Jaula”
Renee Pillai, “Boy with Kite”
Sean Malcolm, “Mother”
Walker McKnight, “Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket”
A total of 7,302 scripts were submitted for this year’s competition. Twelve individual screenwriters were selected as finalists. Their scripts were then read and judged by the Academy Nicholl Fellowships Committee, who ultimately voted the winners.
The 2019 finalists are (listed alphabetically by author):
Paul Ashton, “Slater Berricks Is a Dead Man”
Matthew Fantaci, “Scandalous!”
Lynn Esta Goldman, “On the Wing”
Gary Patent, “Cosmonaut”
Joel Sinensky, “The Lie Factory”
Toy Styles, “Concrete Beach”
Jack Zafran, “Justice, Justice”
Fellowships are awarded with the understanding that the recipients will each complete a feature-length screenplay during their fellowship year. The Academy acquires no rights to the works of Nicholl fellows and does not involve itself commercially in any way with their completed scripts. The global competition, which aims to identify and encourage talented new screenwriters, has awarded 161 fellowships since it began in 1986.