Best Adapted Screenplay

Crazy Heart	Scott Cooper	WGA	0,0
District 9	Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell	CC, GG	both 0,0
An Education	Nick Hornby	CC	0,0
Fantastic Mr. Fox	Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach	CC	both 1,0
Julie and Julia	Nora Ephron	WGA	3,0
Precious	Geoffrey Fletcher	CC, WGA	0,0
A Single Man	Tom Ford, David Scearce	CC	both 0,0
Star Trek	Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman	WGA	both 0,0
Up in the Air	Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner	*LAFC, *NBR, *CC, *GG, WGA	both 0,0 [writing only]

Leading the pack are Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for taking the interior monologue of the Walter Kirn novel Up in the Air and bringing it to an external, visual medium. Similarly, Geoffrey Fletcher will score for reworking the first-person narrative of Precious (which is, as its awkward subtitle declares, Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire.) An Education missed out on a WGA nod on an eligibility technicality, but Nick Hornby’s tender adaptation of Lynn Barber’s memoir will easily land in the Academy’s top five.

Surely that film’s exclusion is the only explanation for the WGA’s inclusion of Julie and Julia; Nora Ephron’s grafting of the memoirs by Ms. Powell and Ms. Child was universally panned for its dreadful Julie half (and merely adequate Julia half.) So I’ll give one wild card slot to the low-key Crazy Heart, which avoided every cliché it approached, and the other to sleeper hit District 9, the apartheid allegory (based on a short film) that’s already on its way to cult classic status.

The remaining candidates are A Single Man, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station, Anthony Peckham’s Invictus, and Star Trek.