When you think of the Academy Awards, you more often think about the things the Academy missed rather than what they got right. Each year, we wake up on Oscar nomination morning in hopes that we hear our favorite performances get a nomination. Sometimes it happens and we can celebrate. However, sometimes the nomination doesn’t happen, but we try to find beauty in the pain.

Then comes the night of the Oscars. While our favorite performer or director may have been nominated and you are rooting to hear their name called and then BOOM, Rami Malek wins over Bradley Cooper. We begin to rethink our entire life and whether or not we will ever watch the Oscars again…however, we always come back, don’t we?

As we look back at some performances that should have won or been nominated, I wanted to dive right into the 87th Academy Awards. It was a big night for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) as it took home Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Cinematography. While I personally do not agree with all of those wins, the most egregious win of the night, for me, came in the Best Actress category.

I have no hard feelings towards Julianne Moore, as she is a great actress, but this was one of the biggest robberies in Oscar history. In Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike gave one of the decade’s best performances as Amy Dunne and should have taken home that trophy.

Amy Dunne is not the easiest of characters to pull off. There are so many layers within this one person; each layer has a different set of skills that must be presented to the audience. Pike, as an an actress, had to convey empathy, heartache, love, compassion, vulnerability to us the audience to show us the different facets of what her on-screen husband was doing to her. She was equally as charismatic as she was scary in this role. There are moments where Pike’s Amy Dunne was putting on the charm in front of everyone and the next minute, she was conning her way back into Desi’s (played by Neil Patrick Harris) world. Within each act of the film, Pike’s work got better and better. Those final moments were the icing on the cake.

To this day, I think back and wonder how the Academy did Rosamund Pike so wrong that night. The performance was hands down above and beyond better than anyone else presented in the Best Actress in a Leading Role category that year.