The 78th annual Writers Guild Awards will take place on only one coast this year. The WGA West has canceled its ceremony in Los Angeles on March 8 amid the ongoing staff union strike, Deadline has confirmed.
The event was scheduled for the J.W. Marriott at L.A. Live to coincide with the WGA East’s sister ceremony in New York City. However, the WGA West has been embroiled in an internal battle as of late after its staff union went on strike nearly two weeks ago. The guild had set a deadline of end of day Friday to resolve the dispute, otherwise it would cancel its west coast awards.
“We are saddened to share that we have just been informed that, due to the PNWSU (WGAW staff union) strike, the decision has been made to cancel the event on March 8,” a memo sent around town Sunday morning reads. “We will let you know if any other event arises from this later this year.”
The WGA West is likely to make a formal announcement on Monday, we hear. The WGSU frames the move to cancel the ceremony as a bully tactic, but in a previous statement, the guild said that it would not ask its own members to cross another union’s picket line — since the staff would very likely have a presence to protest the event if still on strike.
Regardless, writers seem quite displeased with the dust-up between their guild and its staff. Last week, dozens of WGA captains joined the staff union’s picket line outside the WGA West headquarters in Los Angeles as a show of solidarity. The fact that the awards ceremony, which has proven to be a bit of an annual bright spot during a tough period, has now been affected seems to have inflamed tensions even more.
“You can’t be labor and be anti-labor,” a WGA member told Deadline Sunday as news spread of the ceremony’s cancellation.
The WGA East and West are two separate entities that occasionally act together, so this does not impact the ceremony on the east coast. Roy Wood Jr. will host the crowd at the Edison Ballroom. Comedian Atsuko Okatsuko was set to be the west coast host for the night.
Deadline also hears that the WGA East will be trying to accommodate any winners or invitees who planned to attend the west coast ceremony. The WGA West is planning to host another ceremony at a later date, though details haven’t been worked out, we hear.
The WGA East’s staff has also been unionized for many years and is not on strike. The west coast staff organized last spring and have been negotiating their first contract with management intermittently since September. The WGSU has repeatedly accused WGA West management of bad faith bargaining, claiming that employers have “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining, showing no intention to come to an agreement on most of WGSU’s core issues.”
The staff union has also suggested that a member of the organizing committee was unlawfully fired.
The WGA West has denied any wrongdoing. In response to the staff’s strike, leadership has also released an updated side-by-side comparison of both parties’ proposals and counter-proposals. It is less than ideal timing, since the writers guild is set to enter its own negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on March 16. This is the first round of talks between the above-the-line unions and the major studios since the contentious 2023 bargaining cycle that led to historically long, dual writers and actors strikes.
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