# BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay

The BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay is a British Academy Film Award for the best script. It was awarded from 1968 to 1982. In 1983 it was split into BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay and BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In the following lists, the titles and names in bold with a gold background are the winners and recipients respectively; those not in bold are the nominees. The years given are those in which the films under consideration were released, not the year of the ceremony, which always takes place the following year.

## Winners and nominees
### 1960s

| Year | Film | Screenwriter(s) |
| 1968 (22nd) | The Graduate | Calder Willingham and Buck Henry |
| 1968 (22nd) | if.... | David Sherwin |
| 1968 (22nd) | The Lion in Winter | James Goldman |
| 1969 (23rd) | Midnight Cowboy | Waldo Salt |
| 1969 (23rd) | Goodbye, Columbus | Arnold Schulman |
| 1969 (23rd) | Women in Love | Larry Kramer |
| 1969 (23rd) | Z | Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún |

### 1970s

| Year | Film | Screenwriter(s) |
| 1970 (24th) | Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid | William Goldman |
| 1970 (24th) | Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice | Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker |
| 1970 (24th) | Kes | Barry Hines, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett |
| 1970 (24th) | They Shoot Horses, Don't They? | James Poe and Robert E. Thompson |
| 1971 (25th) | The Go-Between | Harold Pinter |
| 1971 (25th) | Gumshoe | Neville Smith |
| 1971 (25th) | Sunday Bloody Sunday | Penelope Gilliatt |
| 1971 (25th) | Taking Off | Miloš Forman, John Guare, Jean-Claude Carrière and John Klein |
| 1972 (26th) | The Hospital (TIE) | Paddy Chayefsky |
| 1972 (26th) | The Last Picture Show (TIE) | Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich |
| 1972 (26th) | Cabaret | Jay Presson Allen |
| 1972 (26th) | A Clockwork Orange | Stanley Kubrick |
| 1973 (27th) | The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie | Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière |
| 1973 (27th) | The Day of the Jackal | Kenneth Ross |
| 1973 (27th) | Sleuth | Anthony Shaffer |
| 1973 (27th) | A Touch of Class | Melvin Frank and Jack Rose |
| 1974 (28th) | Chinatown The Last Detail | Robert Towne |
| 1974 (28th) | Blazing Saddles | Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor and Alan Uger |
| 1974 (28th) | The Conversation | Francis Ford Coppola |
| 1974 (28th) | Lacombe, Lucien | Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano |
| 1975 (29th) | Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore | Robert Getchell |
| 1975 (29th) | Dog Day Afternoon | Frank Pierson |
| 1975 (29th) | Jaws | Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb |
| 1975 (29th) | Nashville | Joan Tewkesbury |
| 1976 (30th) | Bugsy Malone | Alan Parker |
| 1976 (30th) | All the President's Men | William Goldman |
| 1976 (30th) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest | Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben |
| 1976 (30th) | The Sunshine Boys | Neil Simon |
| 1977 (31st) | Annie Hall | Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman |
| 1977 (31st) | Equus | Peter Shaffer |
| 1977 (31st) | Network | Paddy Chayefsky |
| 1977 (31st) | Rocky | Sylvester Stallone |
| 1978 (32nd) | Julia | Alvin Sargent |
| 1978 (32nd) | Close Encounters of the Third Kind | Steven Spielberg |
| 1978 (32nd) | The Goodbye Girl | Neil Simon |
| 1978 (32nd) | A Wedding | John Considine, Patricia Resnick, Allan F. Nicholls and Robert Altman |
| 1979 (33rd) | Manhattan | Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman |
| 1979 (33rd) | The China Syndrome | Mike Gray, T. S. Cook and James Bridges |
| 1979 (33rd) | The Deer Hunter | Deric Washburn |
| 1979 (33rd) | Yanks | Colin Welland and Walter Bernstein |

### 1980s

| Year | Film | Screenwriter(s) |
| 1980 (34th) | Being There | Jerzy Kosiński |
| 1980 (34th) | Airplane! | Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker |
| 1980 (34th) | The Elephant Man | Christopher De Vore, Eric Bergren and David Lynch |
| 1980 (34th) | Kramer vs. Kramer | Robert Benton |
| 1981 (35th) | Gregory's Girl | Bill Forsyth |
| 1981 (35th) | Atlantic City | John Guare |
| 1981 (35th) | Chariots of Fire | Colin Welland |
| 1981 (35th) | The French Lieutenant's Woman | Harold Pinter |
| 1982 (36th) | Missing | Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart |
| 1982 (36th) | E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial | Melissa Mathison |
| 1982 (36th) | Gandhi | John Briley |
| 1982 (36th) | On Golden Pond | Ernest Thompson |