Juno Screenplay

Diablo Cody won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008 for Juno, which was her first produced screenplay. The screenplay was also recognized with a BAFTA Award and a Writers Guild of America Award. Cody's distinctive dialogue, filled with quirky slang and rapid-fire wit, was widely praised and helped launch her career as a prominent screenwriter.

The title character Juno MacGuff is a 16-year-old high school student in suburban Minnesota who discovers she is pregnant after a sexual encounter with her friend Paulie Bleeker, played by Michael Cera. She chooses Mark and Vanessa Loring, a couple she finds through a PennySaver classified ad, to adopt her baby. Jason Bateman plays Mark and Jennifer Garner plays Vanessa in the 2007 film directed by Jason Reitman.

Juno uses a novelty hamburger-shaped telephone to call the women's clinic and later the prospective adoptive parents, and it became one of the most iconic props from the film. The hamburger phone is mentioned directly in Diablo Cody's screenplay and became a sought-after item after the film's release, with sales of novelty hamburger phones reportedly surging. It encapsulates the screenplay's indie-quirk aesthetic that defined late-2000s cinema.

The film's soundtrack, heavily featuring Kimya Dawson of The Moldy Peaches, became a commercial hit and helped define the indie-folk aesthetic of the late 2000s. Music is central to the screenplay's characterization, as Jason Bateman's character Mark bonds with Juno over shared tastes in punk rock and horror films. The soundtrack album reached the top of the Billboard 200 chart in early 2008.