What Won: Graham Moore (The Imitation Game) For the second year running, Fox Searchlight has been behind the Best Picture winner, with Oscar fiend Harvey Weinstein only seeing his films get minor awards. So it is that The Imitation Game, Bob's horse for 2015, failed to capitalise on initial buzz, only taking home the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. In all honesty, however, even that is too much. What Should Have Won: Anything else. The Imitation Game isn't a terrible film, it's just irritatingly typical Oscar bait, with a true life tragedy sanitised to ensure it jerks tears, yet never truly upsets. Compared to the likes of The Theory Of Everything, which took a similar "biopic of a smart Brit" idea and made something uniquely poignant, or Inherent Vice, which made sense of Thomas Pynchon's novel before removing it again, Graham Moore's script is woefully simple. Probably the most deserving winner is also the least deserving to be in this category - Whiplash. Only "Adapted" because Damien Chazelle made a short film of the same concept in an attempt to attract funding, it's a tense story that strings together electrifying 'action' beats with mostly one-sided verbal sparring. And the ending doesn't cut out the most interesting part of the story. This would, of course, have been a moot point had Gillian Flynn got nominated for adapting her own Gone Girl.
