Sinners is the latest winner of the Academy Award for Writing (Original Screenplay), taking the prize for the 2025 film year. Here is my ranking of the category’s winners for films released from 2000 onward. The Academy’s records establish who won; the order below is editorial judgment, based on premise, character, dialogue, structure, thematic depth and staying power.
How this ranking works
The film year, not the ceremony year, determines what counts: the first film in scope is 2000’s Almost Famous, honored at the 2001 ceremony. The latest completed ceremony, in 2026, honored 2025’s Sinners. The category is Writing (Original Screenplay), not adapted screenplay or Best Picture. The Academy describes its database as “the official record of past Academy Award winners and nominees”; it does not rank winners against one another.
I weigh how distinctively a premise generates scenes, how much character choices shape the story, the precision of dialogue and payoff, and the ideas a film continues to open up. These are critical judgments, not Academy scores or a claim of consensus. The list covers winners for film years 2000–2025.
The winners, ranked
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) — Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth
A breakup becomes a science-fiction procedure, but the script’s real invention is structural: memory erasure turns into a broken, branching love story. Joel and Clementine are not idealized, and the film’s final choice carries the force of everything the characters have tried to forget. Its high-concept machinery serves emotional ambiguity rather than replacing it.
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Parasite (2019) — Bong Joon Ho and Han Jin-won
The Kim family’s infiltration of the Park household begins as a nimble con and keeps changing genre without losing causal clarity. Details planted as comedy or practical problem-solving acquire darker meanings as the class conflict tightens. The film’s control of entrances, exits, spaces and reversals makes its social argument inseparable from its suspense.
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Get Out (2017) — Jordan Peele
Chris’s visit to his girlfriend’s family turns the rituals of polite welcome into a system of escalating warning signs. The script makes its satire legible through behavior—the awkward compliments, the party guests’ invasive questions—then transforms those signals into literal danger. Its premise is exceptionally efficient: nearly every joke, character encounter and prop contributes to the unease.
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Lost in Translation (2003) — Sofia Coppola
Two lonely Americans in Tokyo connect through quiet conversations rather than a conventional romantic plot. Coppola lets pauses, small jokes and the disorientation of travel carry the relationship, while the setting shapes the characters’ isolation without reducing the city to a mere backdrop. The unresolved goodbye is a fitting payoff for a story built on a temporary, difficult-to-name intimacy.
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Her (2013) — Spike Jonze
Theodore’s relationship with an operating system sounds like a speculative hook, but the screenplay treats it as a serious question about intimacy, projection and change. Samantha’s development gives the relationship an arc that cannot be reduced to Theodore’s needs, and the ending accepts that emotional attachment can be real even when it cannot remain familiar.
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Spotlight (2015) — Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy
Reporting becomes the film’s engine: each interview, document and decision to keep digging alters what the team understands and what it can responsibly publish. The script gives a large ensemble distinct professional and personal pressures without turning the investigation into a lone-genius story. Its restrained form matches the painstaking work it depicts.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) — Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
Its multiverse conceit can accommodate absurdist comedy, martial-arts action and family conflict, but the screenplay keeps returning to Evelyn’s strained relationships with her husband and daughter. The escalating novelty is a risk as well as a strength; the emotional resolution earns its place by making attention and kindness the story’s answer to cosmic overload.
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Midnight in Paris (2011) — Woody Allen
A screenwriter who longs for an imagined past is given a literal route into it. The time-travel device neatly externalizes the temptation to mistake nostalgia for a life, and the encounters with celebrated artists keep the fantasy playful rather than merely reverential. Its romantic ending follows from a character finally choosing the present over a curated ideal.
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Sinners (2025) — Ryan Coogler
The newest winner in this list, Sinners combines a specific historical setting with horror, music and a story of family and community under threat. Its ambition lies in making genre spectacle carry cultural and emotional weight. It ranks highly for the reach of that synthesis, though its place may shift as the film’s lasting influence becomes clearer.
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Juno (2007) — Diablo Cody
Juno’s fast, stylized talk gives the film a sharply defined voice, but the script’s strongest work is in letting that voice change as she confronts the consequences of pregnancy and adoption. The relationship between Juno and the prospective adoptive parents becomes more complicated than her initial plan, giving the comedy real emotional stakes.
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Almost Famous (2000) — Cameron Crowe
A teenage reporter’s assignment with a rock band supplies a coming-of-age story full of competing loyalties: to his mother, the musicians, and his own desire to belong. Crowe’s affectionate detail makes the band’s world vivid, while the screenplay understands that the young writer’s access is also a vulnerability.
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Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) — Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo
Theatrical ambition, celebrity anxiety and family estrangement collide in a story whose apparent continuous movement intensifies the pressure on its characters. Its show-business satire is most compelling when it turns inward, exposing how each character performs a version of self. The script’s deliberately unstable boundary between reality and fantasy is a productive strength, even if it makes the film less emotionally accessible than those above it.
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Manchester by the Sea (2016) — Kenneth Lonergan
Lee’s return home after his brother’s death gives the screenplay a practical present-tense obligation—caring for his nephew—while gradually revealing the grief that makes that task unbearable. The withheld history changes the meaning of his reserve without offering an easy cure. Lonergan’s dialogue can be funny and painfully ordinary in the same breath.
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Little Miss Sunshine (2006) — Michael Arndt
A family road trip to a children’s beauty pageant gives each character a distinct failure or disappointment, then puts them in a van that literally requires cooperation. The comedy comes from friction rather than interchangeable eccentricity. The final performance turns the family’s embarrassment into solidarity without pretending that their problems have vanished.
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Talk to Her (2002) — Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar builds an intricate story around two men caring for women who cannot respond, testing the difference between devotion, loneliness and control. The structure’s revelations reframe earlier behavior, and the film’s shifts in tone resist a simple moral reading. Its unsettling treatment of intimacy is among the category’s most formally daring winners.
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Promising Young Woman (2020) — Emerald Fennell
Its revenge premise initially plays as a series of confrontations, each exposing the ease with which people excuse predatory behavior. Fennell’s tonal control makes the audience reassess the apparent rules of the story, and the ending refuses the clean catharsis a revenge narrative might promise. That choice is potent, though divisive by design.
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Django Unchained (2012) — Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino uses the western’s pursuit-and-revenge structure to tell a story rooted in slavery, with extended dialogue scenes that double as tests of power. The central partnership gives the film momentum, and its performances often turn conversation into suspense. Its scale and tonal swings are thrilling, though they can make the script feel less disciplined than the highest-ranked entries.
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) — Quentin Tarantino
The film’s long drift through a recreated Los Angeles gives Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth room to become more than plot functions. Its historical counterfactual depends on the audience understanding the real violence it is revising, and the late turn is both provocative and deliberately unreal. The patient character work is memorable, even as the leisurely structure can feel diffuse.
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Milk (2008) — Dustin Lance Black
Harvey Milk’s political life is framed through the act of recording his story, giving the screenplay an elegiac shape while tracking the organizing work behind his rise. The film makes coalition-building and public persuasion central dramatic actions, not background context. Its more conventional biographical structure is effective, if less formally surprising than the scripts above it.
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Gosford Park (2001) — Julian Fellowes
The country-house murder mystery becomes a finely layered study of class, with the servants’ quarters and the upstairs rooms operating as connected but unequal worlds. Fellowes handles a crowded ensemble through social observation and shifting access to information. Its breadth is impressive; the very size of the cast means some characters remain more sharply etched than others.
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Inception (2010) — Christopher Nolan
Nolan turns a heist into a system of nested dreams, each with rules that can generate action and suspense. The layered design is an extraordinary piece of cinematic engineering, and the emotional thread of Cobb’s grief gives it a human anchor. At times, however, explanation and mechanics crowd out the character work that distinguishes the top-ranked films.
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Green Book (2018) — Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly
The road-trip structure gives its two leads repeated opportunities to challenge each other’s assumptions, and the central performances make their growing rapport accessible. The screenplay’s treatment of race and its perspective on its real-life subjects have drawn criticism; that limitation matters when judging how fully the film complicates its own familiar arc.
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The Hurt Locker (2009) — Mark Boal
Boal organizes the story around bomb-disposal assignments, using the recurring work to expose the particular addiction to danger that defines Staff Sergeant James. The episodic structure conveys the pressure and repetition of combat, but it offers less of the cumulative character development or formal surprise found higher on the list.
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Anora (2024) — Sean Baker
A whirlwind romance with a wealthy young man becomes a frantic effort to keep control of a life that other people can buy, bargain over or disrupt. Baker’s momentum and attention to working-class precarity give the comedy bite. The film’s episodic turns are part of its energy, though its movement between registers makes it a less tightly unified screenplay than the leaders.
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Crash (2005) — Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco
The interlocking Los Angeles stories aim to show how prejudice and fear cross paths among strangers. The structure is ambitious, and individual encounters can be forceful, but the screenplay’s desire to connect nearly every thread can make its characters feel like illustrations of a point rather than people with room to surprise.
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Belfast (2021) — Kenneth Branagh
Branagh filters a family’s life amid the Troubles through a child’s viewpoint, finding meaning in neighborhood routines, family conflict and the prospect of leaving home. That intimacy gives the film warmth, but its compressed, memory-shaped approach offers fewer turns in character and structure than the winners ranked above it.
Where the close calls fall
The top tier favors scripts in which form and premise work together: memory becomes structure in Eternal Sunshine, class becomes suspense in Parasite, and social ritual becomes horror in Get Out. Other winners excel in different ways. Inception is a feat of construction, Spotlight a model of procedural ensemble storytelling, and Almost Famous a generous character study. Their placement reflects the balance of criteria, not a claim that one kind of screenplay matters more in every context.
For an official record of winners and nominees, consult the Academy Awards Database. The Academy’s record confirms award results; it does not supply this ranking.
NEON’s official Parasite page identifies the film as a four-time Oscar winner, including Best Original Screenplay, and lists a Blu-ray edition.
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