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The 2025 Oscar screenplay field ranged from an original story built around clashing social worlds to adaptations shaped from novels, lives and lived experience. My top pick is Anora, followed by The Substance and Conclave. This is an editorial ranking of the writing, not an official Academy order: the Academy named the nominees and winners, while the judgments below weigh dramatic design, character and dialogue, voice, tonal control and how fully each script realizes its premise or source.
The 97th Academy Awards, held March 2, 2025, honored films released in 2024. The ten screenplay nominees were split evenly between Original and Adapted Screenplay. Sean Baker’s Anora won Original Screenplay; Peter Straughan’s Conclave won Adapted Screenplay.
How these screenplay nominees are ranked
The order reflects how effectively each script turns its material into a dramatic experience: whether its structure creates momentum, its characters and dialogue feel specific, its voice is distinctive, and its thematic or emotional payoff is earned. Adaptations are judged on the screenplays themselves, not on whether they reproduce their sources. The Academy’s category record establishes the field and credits, not a quality score; reasonable viewers can rank these films differently.
The 10 2025 Oscar screenplay nominees, ranked
1. Anora — Original Screenplay winner
Sean Baker’s screenplay earns the top spot for the pressure it creates where different social worlds collide, and for the way its central relationship gives that collision human stakes. Its tonal shifts are part of the dramatic design: the story can change register without losing sight of the people caught in it. That combination of a vivid premise and escalating personal consequences makes it the most complete piece of writing in this field.
#1 Best Overall
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The Academy awarded Baker the Original Screenplay Oscar. At the ceremony, he thanked the sex-worker community, saying its members had shared their stories and life experience with him, and expressed his deepest respect. The Associated Press also reported his acceptance remark to his collaborators: “You elevated everything I wrote and made me look very good.”
2. The Substance — Original Screenplay nominee
Coralie Fargeat’s script ranks just behind the winner because it commits so fully to its central conceit and keeps turning that idea into story. The premise is not merely a striking hook; its value lies in how relentlessly the screenplay develops it. That single-minded escalation gives the film a forceful identity and makes its writing difficult to confuse with anyone else’s.
3. Conclave — Adapted Screenplay winner
Peter Straughan’s adaptation makes suspense out of competing interests, shaping the material into a screen story driven by uncertainty about what people want and what they will do to get it. The writing’s strength is its management of those pressures: revelations and decisions keep the dramatic contest moving. The film is based on Robert Harris’s book, a useful companion for readers interested in the source, though the novel is not a screenplay edition.
Rank #2
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The Academy gave Straughan the Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Speaking backstage, he said, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” and described beginning as a playwright in northeast England.
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4. A Real Pain — Original Screenplay nominee
Jesse Eisenberg’s script places character contrast and dialogue at the center of its dramatic engine. Its interest comes from watching different temperaments shape the same experience in different ways; the exchanges carry both friction and the possibility of change. That interplay gives the emotional movement its credibility, even if the film’s effect depends more on intimate character work than on a boldly reinvented form.
5. Nickel Boys — Adapted Screenplay nominee
RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes take on the particular challenge of turning a novel into a film without treating adaptation as a simple matter of transferring events. The screenplay’s achievement is its commitment to a formal point of view: the audience is asked to experience the story through a carefully controlled perspective. That makes the writing ambitious, though its approach can be less immediately legible than the more conventionally driven scripts above it.
Rank #3
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6. A Complete Unknown — Adapted Screenplay nominee
James Mangold and Jay Cocks face the challenge of dramatizing a public figure’s life, where the audience may already bring expectations about the person and the history. The screenplay’s task is to make that material work as a character story rather than a sequence of biographical milestones. Against the field’s more intimate designs, the scale of the subject is both its opportunity and its constraint: the writing must select and shape, not simply chronicle.
7. The Brutalist — Original Screenplay nominee
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold write on a large historical canvas, with a long-form structure that asks the audience to connect character and theme across an expansive story. The ambition is evident in the scope of the design; the trade-off is that breadth can diffuse the close dramatic pressure that makes the top-ranked scripts so immediate. Its placement reflects that balance, not a lack of purpose or scale.
8. September 5 — Original Screenplay nominee
Moritz Binder and Tim Fehlbaum, with co-writer Alex David, build tension around a tightly bounded event and perspective. That restriction gives the drama a clear frame: the screenplay’s choices about what to show and when become central to its suspense. It is an effective structural idea, though the concentrated design leaves less room for the range of character and tonal movement found higher in this ranking.
Rank #4
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9. Emilia Pérez — Adapted Screenplay nominee
Jacques Audiard wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Thomas Bidegain, Léa Mysius and Nicolas Livecchi. The collaborative credit is notable in a field where the writing must sustain a distinctive identity across complex material. Its ambition is clear, but the screenplay’s many demands do not cohere as consistently as the strongest entries here; its placement is a judgment about dramatic integration, not a dismissal of its reach.
10. Sing Sing — Adapted Screenplay nominee
Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar are credited with the screenplay, while the story credit also names Bentley, Kwedar, Clarence Maclin and John “Divine G” Whitfield. That distinction matters: the Academy record credits the screenplay and story separately. This is the closest call at the bottom of the list, not a claim that the film is objectively the weakest. In a field of ten strong nominees, its writing makes a less forceful impression on structure and voice than the scripts placed above it.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the awards results tell you—and what they do not
Anora and Conclave won their respective screenplay categories, but those outcomes do not establish an official ranking of all ten nominees. The Academy’s record is the source for the nominations, writing credits and wins; the placements here are critical judgments. The Associated Press reported that Emilia Pérez led the 2025 nominations with 13 overall, a measure of its broader awards-season recognition rather than a screenplay score.
AP also reported that Anora had a $6 million budget and earned over $40 million at the box office. Those are AP’s reported figures, not a separate verification of box-office accounting, and they do not determine the script’s position here.
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