The race for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards is packed with ten films all vying to take home the award show's top honors. However, one of the films will be heading into the Oscars tainted as The Holdovers has been hit with accusations of plagiarism ahead of the award show on Sunday night.

The accusation comes from screenwriter Simon Stephenson, best known for his work on Luca and Paddington 2, who has been in a back-and-forth since January 2024 with the Writers Guild of America about the alleged plagiarism, according to Variety. Stephenson alleges The Holdovers is entirely plagiarized from the script of an unproduced film he completed in 2013 titled Frisco.

At the time, Frisco found itself on the Black List as one of the top unproduced script's available in Hollywood. The film centered on a “40-something pediatric allergist” who begins to learn lessons about living life from a “terminally ill 15-year-old” who crashes the allergist's weekend trip to San Francisco for a conference.

Paul Giamatti and Golden Globes trophy in front of an In-N-Out.

“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,” Stephenson wrote in a Feb. 25 email to the WGA board acquired by Variety.

Stephenson contends that The Holdovers director Alexander Payne had the script for Frisco in 2013, but was “not interested in prod or directing it” at the time according to an email from United Talent Agency's Geoff Morley. The script was then brought to Payne again in 2019 by then-Netflix executive Lisa Nishimura, with Payne once again passing on it.

Some time after the 2019 email to Stephenson, Payne began working on the script for The Holdovers with screenwriter David Hemingson, though Hemingson would receive sole writing credit for the film.

The Holdovers would go on to receive almost universal acclaim when it released in the U.S. in October 2023. Heading into the 96th Academy Awards, the film earned five nominations including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.