Patton Oswald Hosts 2016 WGA Awards, Spotlight Writers Win Original Screenplay Honors

Posted on February 15, 2016

The 2016 Writers Guild Award Winners were announced at concurrent ceremonies at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles and the Edison Ballroom in New York City. In Los Angeles, Patton Oswald was the host. The opening to the show featured a montage about the Golf Channel, which jokingly noted that it was the only network the guild could get to broadcast the show. As expected, Oswald didn't exactly keep it PG rated, poking fun at writers who ended up in jail for loaning out their screeners to a jab at the recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Big winners of the night included Josh Singer & Tom McCarthy, who won the Original Screenplay Award for the film Spotlight, Charles Randolp;h and Adam McKay for best Adapted Screenplay for The Big Short and Alex Gibney, who won Best Documentary Screenplay for HBO's Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.

In the television category, Mr. Robot's writing staff, Kyle Bradstreet, Kate Erickson, Sam Esmail, David Iserson, Randolph Leon, Adam Penn and Matt Pyken, picked the award for Best New Series. Matthew Weiner, Lisa Albert, Semi Chellas, Jonathan Igla, Janet Leahy, Erin Levy, Tom Smuts, Robert Towne and Carly Wray won Best Drama Series for Mad Men. Steve Blackman, Bob DeLaurentis, Noah Hawley, Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolper won the award for Best Adapted Long Form for Fargo.

Head writer Jessi Klein and her writing staff (Hallie Cantor, Kim Caramele, Kyle Dunnigan, Jon Glaser, Kurt Metzger, Christine Nangle, Dan Powell, Tami Sagher and Amy Schumer) won Best comedy/Variety Sketch series for their work on Inside Amy Schumer.

You can see a list of all the award winners here. Here is Patton Oswald's opening monologue: