A brilliant, highly likable, bespectacled Brit with greatness inside him lucks into marriage with a pretty, utterly devoted wife and then wham…a debilitating disease, death looming, all seemingly lost. But the spirit will not buckle under, technology and medicine find a way and the guy fulfills his destiny at the end and becomes a best-selling author and the subject of an Errol Morris doc. Are you kidding me? Best Picture nom, James Marsh for Best Director, Eddie Redmayne for Best Actor….slamdunkaroonie. Oscar bells! Warning alarm heard over at Universal this morning….brrrnnnggg!….brrnngggg! Goddam it, “triumph over terrible crushing adversity” was supposed to be owned by Unbroken this year, and out of the effing blue we get elbowed aside on our own thematic turf from sister Focus? Brad-vs.-Angie on the Best Picture racetrack is a fun angle, but this…this is serious!

Listen to that haunting-but-uplifting score by Johann Johannsson. I guarantee you that when he was hired, it was conditional upon Johannsson’s pledge to emulate James Horner‘s Beautiful Mind score.

Sidenote: The catastrophically balding Simon McBurney, whose sparse thatch was hanging on for dear life in Magic in the Moonlight but who nonetheless wore a black baseball cap to the recent L.A. premiere, wears a rug for his role in The Theory of Everything.