Writers Guild Awards joy for Emerald Fennell and Sacha Baron Cohen

Emerald Fennell and Sacha Baron Cohen were among the winners at the 73rd annual Writers Guild Awards.In a major boost ahead of next month’s Oscars, Fennell won the best original screenplay prize for her directorial debut Promising Young Woman.She beat Aaron Sorkin, writer of The Trial Of The Chicago 7 and perhaps her chief rival for the equivalent category at the Academy Awards.Baron Cohen and his writing team won the Writers Guild’s best adapted screenplay award for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and are also Oscar nominated.Accepting her prize in a video message from the UK, Fennell, 35, said the win was an “incredible, unbelievable, wonderful, unexpected dream come true”.In his acceptance speech, Baron Cohen nodded to the long list of writers on his headline-making Borat sequel and joked: “I can’t help thinking that we won it because 60% of the Writers Guild worked on this thing.”