From the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, received today:

Dear Rose,

After completing over 15,000 reads, we’ve finally reached the next stage of the 2016 Academy Nicholl competition. With the scores tallied for the 6,915 entries, we have to inform too many writers of good scripts featuring entertaining and engaging stories, intriguing characters and strong craft that they have not advanced into the next round. Regrettably, Steel Clouds was not one of the 357 entries selected as a Quarterfinalist in the 2016 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.

A bit of good news: one of the two first round readers gave your script a positive score, though the score was not high enough to qualify for a third read. Beyond this, we do not provide exact numerical scores. If you elected to receive reader comments, those should offer a glimpse of what two readers thought about your script.

While we strive to make the evaluation of screenplays as objective a process as possible, it is inherently both a personal and an extremely subjective matter. A lack of success here may not have any bearing on your reception in the marketplace where a sale is the ultimate measure of success. I’ll even venture a prediction: several non-advancing writers will become professional screenwriters in the near future.

To tell you a little about the process: every script was read twice. We then considered the better of the first two scores and the highest scoring 1,247 scripts, the most ever, were read a third time. Each read resulted in a numerical score being awarded. Scores for each entrant's script were totaled, and the Quarterfinalists were selected on the basis of the two highest of the three scores.

If you elected to view the comments readers wrote about your script, those will become accessible in your online account by September 1st (simply click tab 7).

In October, be on the lookout for an email invitation to the Academy Nicholl Fellowships Awards Ceremony to be held in Beverly Hills on November 3. In case you don’t know, we regularly post information about the competition on the Academy Nicholl Facebook page at www.facebook.com/nichollfellowships.

Early next year, we'll send you a link to a 2017 application form, which will include a list of the recipients of the 2016 Fellowships. Results will be posted online at www.oscars.org/nicholl in November.

Best of luck with all your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Greg Beal