Possible Nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), Best Actress (Kiera Knightly), Best Original Screenplay (Graham Moore), Best Film Editing, Best Production Design At this time last year, I was heavily optimistic on the awards chances of The Fifth Estate, a biopic of hacktivist Julian Assange starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The film ended up being one of the biggest flops of the year, not only in the awards kudos game, but financially too. You may ask then, why would I go with another Benedict Cumberbatch-starring biopic a mere year later? Glutton for punishment, perhaps? As stupid as I will feel if the film totally bombs, I believe The Imitation Game will be a real competitor in the Oscar race. The film's protagonist, Alan Turing, was a brilliant man who helped crack the Enigma Code during WWII, helping to secure the Allies eventual victory over the Nazis, but Turing was eventually chemically castrated by the British government due to his homosexuality. In all honesty, this story is likely to be much more interesting to the Academy than Julian Assange's tale, so for now, I am cautiously optimistic.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
