Oscars 2024 Nominated Film 'The Holdovers' Accused Of Plagiarism Right Before Awards Ceremony

Hours before the 96th Academy Awards, The Holdovers,?one of the best picture nominations this year has landed in a controversy. The film written by David Hemingson (who is nominated for Best Original Screenplay at 2024 Oscars)?has been accused of plagiarism by Simon Stephenson, best known for penning the 2019 film Luca, who said that the "the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from frisco".

Oscars 2024 Nominated Film 'The Holdovers' Accused Of Plagiarism

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As per Simon, the script of Frisco was sent to?Alexander Payne, the director of The Holdovers,?in 2013 and 2019 in an attempt to get him to board the project. In January, Simon unvieled the drafts of the same that showed striking similarity in?the screenplays of both stories and the overall structure. He has now made an urgent to?WGA board.?

As per Variety, he wrote, "I can demonstrate beyond any possible doubt that the?meaningful entirety?of the screenplay for a film with WGA-sanctioned credits that is currently on track to win a screenwriting Oscar has been plagiarised line-by-line from a popular unproduced screenplay of mine. I can also show that the director of the offending film was sent and read my screenplay on two separate occasions prior to the offending film entering development.?By ‘meaningful entirety’ I do mean literally?everything- story, characters, structure, scenes, dialogue, the whole thing. Some of it is just insanely brazen: many of the most important scenes are effectively unaltered and even remain visibly identical in layout on the page."

He continued, "I’ve been a working writer for 20 years – in my native UK before I came to the US – and so I’m very aware that people can often have surprisingly similar ideas and sometimes a few elements can be ‘borrowed’ etc.?This just isn’t that situation. The two screenplays are forensically?identical?and riddled with unique smoking guns throughout".

Meanwhile, The Holdovers is?running in the race against Maestro, Anatomy of a Fall, Maestro, May-December, and Past Lives at Oscars 2024 in the best screenplay category.

For more news and updates?from the world of??OTT, and?celebrities?from?Bollywood?and?Hollywood, keep reading?Indiatimes Entertainment.