Get Out and Nope cement Peele as one of the most distinctive original voices in Hollywood — but the awards path has been uneven
Jordan Peele and the Original Screenplay Oscar: What the Record Shows
Jordan Peele’s relationship with the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay is one of the more instructive case studies in recent Oscar history. He won the award in 2018 for “Get Out,” his debut feature, becoming the first Black writer to win Best Original Screenplay — a fact that was noted at the ceremony and in the coverage that followed. What happened after that win is a more complex story, and one worth examining for what it reveals about how the Academy recognizes genre filmmaking and about the particular challenges facing original voices in Hollywood.
Get Out: A Genre Film That Changed the Category
“Get Out” (2017) is now considered a landmark of American cinema — a horror film that uses the grammar of the genre to produce a precise, formally controlled analysis of liberal racism in contemporary America. The screenplay is constructed with almost mathematical rigor: every element introduced in the first act returns with accumulated meaning in the third, and the film’s central metaphor — the “sunken place,” the state of conscious paralysis in which the protagonist is trapped while his body is controlled — is both viscerally effective as horror and analytically exact as social commentary. Peele wrote the script over five years, and his description of the process has emphasized the difficulty of calibrating the tonal shifts that allow the film to function simultaneously as entertainment and as social critique. The WGA recognized it with an Outstanding Original Screenplay award, and the Oscar nomination and win followed. The Library of Congress selected “Get Out” for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2023, six years after its release — an unusually rapid recognition for a contemporary film.
Us and Nope: The Path After Get Out
Peele’s follow-up films, “Us” (2019) and “Nope” (2022), both received positive critical responses but were more polarizing among audiences. Neither received an Oscar nomination for screenplay, and neither generated the awards season momentum that “Get Out” had produced. “Us” is a more formally complex film in some ways — its central conceit involves a family encountering mirror-image versions of themselves, and its thematic reach is broader — but critics noted that its screenplay’s ambitions occasionally exceed its execution in ways that “Get Out” did not allow. “Nope” was similarly ambitious and similarly mixed in its reception, praised for its visual scale and its meditation on spectacle and exploitation, and questioned for structural choices in its second act. The Academy’s record with original screenplays in the horror and science fiction genres has been historically uneven. “Get Out” was an exception, powered by its political specificity and the directness of its social commentary. Peele’s subsequent films have not found the same formal clarity in screenplay terms, even as they have confirmed his status as one of the most consistently original filmmakers working in American commercial cinema.
What Originality Requires
The arc of Peele’s Oscar history raises a question that is relevant to any screenwriter attempting to work in genre with serious intent: what does it take to make a genre film that the Academy will recognize as literature? The answer, based on the available evidence, seems to involve a combination of formal precision, social or political specificity, and a directness of thematic argument that allows a broad audience to access the film’s concerns without requiring genre literacy. “Get Out” worked because it did not require prior investment in horror to grasp its meaning. “Nope” requires more — its commentary on the spectacle economy and the ways that Black performers have been exploited by entertainment is embedded more deeply in the film’s genre logic and less accessible on the surface. Whether that makes it a better or worse film is a separate question from whether it is a better or worse Oscar contender. The distinction matters for screenwriters. Jordan Peele’s complete career and screenplay record is documented at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. The WGA’s recognition of “Get Out” is part of the guild’s archive at Writers Guild of America. For analysis of Peele’s work within the tradition of Black horror and social commentary film, the American Film Institute has published contextual materials on his contribution to American cinema.
