Rings Up for More Awards
Staff Reporter

LOS ANGELES: The Writers Guild of America, the group that represents movie screenwriters, on Thursday named The Lord of the Rings among a wide-ranging list of nominees for its annual film awards, as tension mounts in Hollywood ahead of next Tuesday's Oscar nominations.

The writers group has an 80 percent success rate at picking Oscar winners, and its choices often help influence voters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who pick winners for the Oscars, Hollywood's top film honors.

Kiwis Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and director Peter Jackson were nominated for their adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

Writers Guild nominees for best original screenplay include Julian Fellowes for the English murder mystery, Gosford Park, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen for the dark drama, The Man Who Wasn't There and Milo Addica and Will Rokos for the racially-charged Monster's Ball.

They are joined by Australian director Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce for the musical Moulin Rouge, as well as Wes Anderson and actor Owen Wilson for the offbeat comedy, The Royal Tennenbaums, about a dysfunctional family.

Nominees for best adapted screenplay include Akiva Goldsman for A Beautiful Mind, about Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash, Jr's struggle with schizophrenia, and for fantasy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, based on the classic J.R.R. Tolkien novels about battles for control of middle Earth.

In the same group, other nominees were Ken Nolan for Black Hawk Down, about a failed US military mission in Somalia, and Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff for quirky youthful romance Ghost World, which was a hit of the independent movie world.

The fifth group of screenwriters in the best adapted screenplay category were British writer Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis for adapting Fielding's book, Bridget Jones' Diary for the screen.

The Coen brothers and Curtis have been Writers Guild (WGA) winners before. The Coens for Fargo in 1996 and Curtis for Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994.

Notably absent from the nominees were Oscar favorites, In the Bedroom, and Memento, which were ineligible for this year's Writers Guild awards because their writers were not members of the Guild when the screenplays were written.

WGA nominees were picked from among 187 movies this year, 111 in the original category and 76 in the adapted screenplay group.

This year marks the 54th Annual Writers Guild Awards. Winners will be named in a ceremony taking place simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles on March 2.

This year's Oscar nominees will be named on February 12.