2025 Award Recipient

Academy Award-nominee and Peabody Award-winner RaMell Ross and Academy Award-nominee and Emmy Award-winner Joslyn Barnes have been named recipients of Writers Guild of America West’s 2025 Paul Selvin Award in recognition of their writing of Nickel Boys, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. Ross will accept on behalf of the duo at the Writers Guild Awards Los Angeles show on Saturday, February 15 at the Beverly Hilton. 

Named for the late Paul Selvin, general counsel to WGAW for 25 years, the honorary award is given each year to the member or members whose script best embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties that are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere—“the essence of the film,” Ross said of the Selvin Award. 

Nickel Boys tells the story of Elwood Curtis, an African-American high school student wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to the Nickel Academy reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida, where he befriends Turner, another ward of the state. The bond between the two teenagers is a source of hope through the unspeakable abuse they experience at the Nickel Academy. Co-writers RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes are both Academy Award-nominated documentarians. Nickel Boys, which Ross also directed, is their second collaboration and Ross’ first foray into fictional storytelling.

“It’s a huge honor to be awarded this particular award especially given where we are in the world right now with disinformation and misinformation being very deliberately created to keep people in a kind of permanent state of crisis,” said Barnes.

“Joslyn and I wanted to take a grand visual approach in which you’re contending with something so fundamentally true, but you’re not being told it, you’re witnessing it yourself,” added Ross. 

The film has received widespread critical acclaim with over 170 award nominations including a Writers Guild nomination for Adapted Screenplay, two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; five Critics Choice Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; six NAACP Image Awards, including Outstanding Writing in a Motion Picture; two Film Independent Spirit Award nominations, including Best Feature; and it won the 2025 AFI Award for Movie of the Year.

Previous recipients of the Paul Selvin Award include Cord Jefferson, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Barry Jenkins, Will Berson & Shaka King and Kenny Lucas & Keith Lucas, Charles Randolph, Adam McKay, Dustin Lance Black, Alex Gibney, Susannah Grant, Eric Roth, Michael Mann, Gary Ross, Liz Hannah, Josh Singer, George Clooney and Tony Kushner.