Oscars 2015: 10 Outrageous Decisions That Are Completely Wrong

3. Jake Gyllenhaal - No Best Actor (Nightcrawler)

Admittedly, the run-in for the Best Actor gong was the fiercest and busiest of all the categories according to the multifarious short-lists that appeared online over the past few weeks. It seemed inevitable that Redmayne, Cumberbatch, Carell and Keaton would be up for the biggest prize their craft offers, but Bradley Cooper was very much in a secondary pot of actors that included David Oyelowo, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ralph Fiennes and Timothy Spall. But even with so much certainty from so many different sources, it isn't necessarily fair to assume that Cumberbatch deserved to be assured: his is a good performance, but it's not revelatory or transformative in the way that Jake Gyllenhaal's was. And neither was Bradley Cooper's. In pure performance terms, the Nightcrawler star can count himself hard done by to come behind both in the running. Why It Went Wrong... It's too much of a showy "transformation" performance: the kind of over the top material that doesn't sit as well with the Academy as genuine, endearing performances. That might sound odd considering the fact that Eddie Redmayne's performance was undoubtedly transformative, but it was limited by real life definition. Like Joaquin Phoenix's turn in Inherent Vice, this was on another plane entirely, and that might well be why it was overlooked.