LOS ANGELES—Days after they were announced as the 10 nominees for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay at the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony, sources revealed Tuesday that the films 12 Years A Slave, Captain Phillips, American Hustle, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Nebraska, Before Midnight, and Philomena were all in fact written over the course of the same Introduction to Screenwriting for Film continuing education class. “Thanks to our work together on narrative structure, realistic dialogue, and screenplay formatting, the students in my class managed to write some great scripts, and I’m very proud of them all,” Barton Adult Education Institute course instructor Keith Whitney told reporters, referring to enrollees in the six-week intensive script writing seminar that included students David O. Russell, Spike Jonze, and Woody Allen. “Granted, they were a little wet behind the ears when we first started out. The script Billy [Ray, writer of Captain Phillips] first gave me didn’t have an inciting incident until page 40, and [Before Midnight writer] Richard [Linklater] couldn’t figure out a three-act structure to save his life. But once we got the fundamentals locked down, they were all able to really impress the Academy. They were a good group.” At press time, Barton Institute sources also confirmed how proud they were of Gravity director Alfonso Cuarón, a recent graduate of the continuing education school’s “Learn Final Cut Pro in 14 Days” online correspondence course.

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