2. Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) Instead Of Graham Moore (The Imitation Game) - Adapted Screenplay
It would've been nice to have seen some diversity at this year's extremely white, extremely male Oscars (we're talking 129 white nominees to two black nominees, and 116 men to 26 women. Go equality!). But one of the categories in which it seemed likely that girls would actually be allowed, aside from the ones like Best Actress in which AMPAS is inevitably forced to take female humans into account, was Adapted Screenplay. Gillian Flynn seemed a shoo-in for adapting her own novel, Gone Girl, into a lean, intelligent, adult take on married life and the American media for David Fincher. For some reason, though, both screenplay categories this year were revealed to be comprised entirely of white men, meaning Flynn didn't have enough Y chromosome to take part. Few will argue that the scripts for Birdman and Foxcatcher don't deserve to be up for Best Adapted Screenplay, but somehow the bland biopic gruel that is Graham Moore's The Imitation Game screenplay got in over Flynn's stellar work on Gone Girl. That's despite Moore altering the facts, almost whitewashing out the really rather crucial homosexual element of the story and straight-up just making up a new personality for subject Alan Turing from scratch.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
