पञ्जावको गञ्जी लाउँदा खुम्चिने उनको छाती नेपालको जर्सीले फुलाउँछ

While the Writers Guild of America might not receive as much public attention as the Academy Awards do, those shaping their Oscar pools might want to pay the  organization a bit more mind. Since the year 2000, the WGA has accurately predicted the winners of the Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars 10 times each. With so much consistency living between the two circuit mainstays, it's hard not to use Friday's announcement of Writers Guild nominees to better estimate what sort of Academy results we'll see come March.

Today, the WGA recognized the following 2013 screenplays for excellence in the Original and Adapted Screenplay categories:

Original Screenplay
American Hustle
Blue Jasmine
Dallas Buyers Club
Her
Nebraska

Adapted Screenplay
August: Osage County
Before Midnight
Captain Phillips
Lone Survivor
The Wolf of Wall Street 

While we would not have bet heavily on either Dallas Buyers Clubor Lone Survivor showing up on the WGA plate, the biggest surprise would have to be the absence of the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, which many have qualified as a hefty candidate for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. The absence of the New York-set character piece does not bode especially well for its Academy chances, but it does help to single out a frontrunner among the bunch of Original competitors: Her.

Without Llewyn Davis in its company, Her does seem like the title to beat. Surely, Alexander Payne delivers some phenomenal material in his dry, sweet Nebraska, but the imagination and emotional severity pumped into Spike Jonze's first lone go at a feature screenplay is the kind of cinematic magic that the WGA is accustomed to recognizing.

Paramount Pictures

Of course, that's not to say that cynicism won't get its share of celebration this year. Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street has earned no dearth of controversy, but also no dearth of critical esteem since its release on Christmas Day. Award circuit precogs are calling the film too raucous and extreme to win Best Picture (which is a slot many are assuming will fall in the hands of 12 Years a Slave regardless), but an Adapted Screenplay win could be right on the mark for the biographical story of major league swindler Jordan Belfort, scripted by Terence Winter.

The only Scorsese picture to date to earn a WGA win is The Departed, although several (including GoodFellas and Mean Streets) have been nominated before.

Additionally, we see nominations in the Documentary Screenplay category:

Documentary Screenplay
Dirty Wars
Herblock 
No Place on Earth
Stories We Tell
We Steal Secrets

IT'S tempting to watch this film and wonder what could have been. Paul Walker, who died last month in a car crash, ventures as far away as he can from his Fast & Furious roles for this film about a father trying desperately to keep his newly born daughter alive, stranded alone in a hospital as Hurricane Katrina strikes.

Walker also produced this film while it's the debut directorial venture of Heisserer (the screenplay writer of films such as Nightmare on Elm Street and The Final Destination 5). They could have been pardoned for feeling the need to prove something. But creditably, they don't, letting the events speak for themselves.

Nolan (Walker) has walked into a New Orleans hospital with his wife in premature labour at 2 am just as Hurricane Katrina is gathering full strength. Within five hours, his wife has died and his child has been kept in a ventilator. Within the next few, the hospital has been evacuated but for those that can't be moved. A few more hours and Nolan realises he is practically the only one left in the hospital with his child. The power goes, so does the back-up, and as the battery starts running out, Nolan manages to discover an old one that needs winding every 2 minutes or so.

He will spend more than 42 hours in that situation, without power, cranking up the battery every 2 minutes, filling up his daughter's saline drip, and somehow managing to sustain himself on dwindling supplies and creeping witness. Any options he hunts for also have to be structured around that two-minute window.

Heisserer, who also wrote Hours, keeps the film engrossing despite the confines of the story, putting Nolan in risks of different forms. And of course we can't get the picture of that helpless baby wrapped in just a towel and a cap out of our heads. The lives of the two are intrinsically linked and the film knows that, and plays on it well.