Oscar contenders La La Land and Moonlight are to go head-to-head in the original screenplay category at next month’s Writers Guild of America awards.
The WGAs will be announced on 19 February.
Damien Chazelle and Barry Jenkins, who both wrote the movies they also directed, are frontrunners in the field, which also includes Hell or High Water, Loving and Manchester By the Sea – all of which were also written by their directors.
Some pundits, meanwhile, expressed surprised that the guild, who vote on nominations and subsequently for the prizes, had not found space for Whit Stillman’s Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship; Silence, which Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks wrote from the novel by Shusaku Endo; or Noah Oppenheim’s Jackie.