The Imitation Game has been groomed for awards season almost since its inception. First rising to awareness on the Black List, a list of the best unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood, Graham Moore's screenplay for The Imitation Game was quickly identified as a potential awards season player. The film was stuck in pre-production purgatory for some time, but once the film secured Benedict Cumberbatch as its star, The Imitation Game immediately skyrocketed to the top of the early 2015 Best Picture prediction charts. True enough to form, as soon as it debuted at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival, The Imitation Game became not only a contender in the 2015 Best Picture race, but a legitimate frontrunner to win the big prize itself. Telling the true life story of mathematician Alan Turing, The Imitation Game focuses on Turing's pivotal role in cracking the German's secret Enigma code during the Second World War. The film is an entertaining take on a relatively unknown part of history, and its familiar pacing and tempo proved popular enough in Toronto to win the festival's People's Choice Award. There is no questioning whether The Imitation Game will be a Best Picture nominee, but whether it can win Best Picture itself is still very much up in the air. If the Academy wants to go the middle-brow historical biopic route, a la The King's Speech in 2011, then The Imitation Game is set up perfectly to win the Oscar. However, if the Academy is feeling a bit more adventurous, expect one of the next two movies on this list to win.
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.
