Oscars 2015: 8 Movies That Should Win (But Totally Won't)

6. Adapted Screenplay

Should Win: Inherent Vice Will Win: The Imitation Game Paul Thomas Anderson is, many will probably agree, one of the greatest American filmmakers working today - and yet he's never won anything at the Oscars. For Inherent Vice, he receives his fourth Academy nomination for Screenplay, and he's going to lose out again to a distinctly average first-timer. Whereas Graham Moore's screenplay for The Imitation Game ticks every prestige-y, Academy-friendly box, Anderson is up against it in the competition for adapting a complex Thomas Pynchon novel and turning out something similarly dense and offbeat. Which would mean Anderson is likely to have his mastery with the pen go unrecognised by the Academy again. At this rate, unless he tempers his ambitions and learns to broaden his appeal, PTA seems destined only for the Alfred Hitchcock/Stanley Kubrick Award for never winning a single Oscar as writer or director.