If you’ve been patiently waiting for an opportunity to see David Fincher’s Gone Girl, having not had the chance to do so in the time since it was released last fall, I sure hope that you didn’t watch tonight’s broadcast of the 87th annual Academy Awards. That’s because the ceremony took not one, but two moments during the show to complexly spoil two of the fantastic film’s best twists.
SPOILER ALERT: If Gone Girl actually wasn’t ruined for you this evening, we would highly recommend switching away to another one of our wonderful articles, because we’re about to go super in depth about what happened!
While the chances of some sort of a Gone Girl reference being featured during this year’s Oscars ceremony was high simply due to the fact that Neil Patrick Harris served as host, the show didn’t waste any time revealing – without warning – the bloody way in which the actor was dispatched in the film. During the first big musical number, guest star Anna Kendrick totally spilled the beans that Harris’ character got his throat slit by a mad woman in the Gillian Flynn adaptation. This was pretty flagrant, but things actually got worse later in the show.
The precise moment I’m referring to was during the presentation of Best Actress, when the reel of footage from films starring all of the candidates– including Gone Girl’s Rosamund Pike – was shown. While the Academy Awards could have organized it so that the clip was from one of the film’s many, many flashback sequences – such as the scene where Pike’s character and Ben Affleck’s get engaged following a tête-à-tête – instead they decided to choose the scene where Pike explains to Affleck that she needs him to support her lie and not get her in trouble for faking her death. It felt flagrant, and I honestly feel bad for anyone who had the movie ruined for them as a result.
To play devil’s advocate, Gone Girl was one of the few films in this year’s Oscar class that was also a box office hit – pulling in $368 million worldwide – which means that a big chunk of the movie-going audience has already seen it. And the movie is already on Blu-ray and available for digital download, so it’s not as though opportunities to see it aren’t available. But it still felt completely unnecessary for the Oscars to have revealed such important moments during the awards ceremony, and one struggles to think why they thought that it was a good idea.
Did Gone Girl get spoiled for you during the show? Are you upset at the Oscars for ruining those key moments, or will you defend them? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
