The Vanity Fair Hollywood issue has become a grand tradition: a shimming high point of the annual awards season, when the year’s hottest screen talents hop off the gruelling promotional schedule that’s come to dictate their every move and wallow in an afternoon of unbridled glamour. If you appear on the cover of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, you know you’ve made it. If you appear on the cover of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue dressed as the novelty pepper mill you got in the office Secret Santa – as Diane Keaton did last year – then you know you’ve really made it.

At first, the cover of the 2017 Hollywood issue looks like business as usual. As usual, it’s been photographed by Annie Leibovitz. As usual, the cover features a mixture of A-list talent (Natalie Portman), breakout stars (Ruth Negga) and a handful of filler attendees placed there solely to confuse anyone who sees the cover 20 years from now. And, as usual, the only instruction given to the cover stars appears to be: “You’re bored, you’re exhausted, you’re getting a little bit cross and you’re starting to need a wee.”

However, inspect the cover and you’ll see a couple of things that distinguish it from all the others. The first is that, inexplicably, most of the actors have been made to wear clothes the same colour as the background. This means that, at first glance, all you see are a bunch of disembodied heads floating around, which is slightly disconcerting.

The second is Amy Adams. Oh, poor Amy Adams. In its unfolded newsstand form, the cover of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue is dedicated to the four biggest guns. There’s Lupita Nyong’o, best supporting actress winner in 2014. There’s Natalie Portman, best actress winner in 2011. There’s Emma Stone, nominated in 2015 and arguably the best actress frontrunner this year.

And then there’s Amy Adams.

She’s the first thing your eye is drawn to. She’s tall – so tall that she obscures the Y in “Vanity Fair” – but also relaxed. She’s leaning back confidently, a look of wry amusement playing across her lips. She is literally the same shape as an Oscar statuette, for crying out loud. Here she is, the lauded star of two of the buzziest films of awards season, effortlessly outshining her award-winning peers. To look at her on the cover of Vanity Fair is to see a woman who knows how good she is. She’s already been nominated for five Oscars, and this is bound to be the year she finally seals the deal. “I’ve got this,” she’s thinking. “I’m a lock.”

Amy Adams was not nominated for a single Oscar this year.

Clearly, this is an outrage. Amy Adams wasn’t nominated for her stagey, imperious role in Nocturnal Animals. Worse still, she wasn’t nominated for her empathetic, nuanced role in Arrival – a blockbuster film that’s taken almost $200m worldwide and (according to Rotten Tomatoes) was even more critically acclaimed than the beloved La La Land. Amy Adams didn’t just deserve a nomination this year. She deserved a statuette.

Everyone thought Adams would be nominated. I did. Annie Leibovitz did. Vanity Fair did. She probably did, to look at her. That’s why she is where she is on the cover. The fact that she wasn’t is nothing short of a scandal. The woman is our new DiCaprio, and she won’t be properly recognised for her talents until she makes a film about how crap it is to crawl around in dirt and get attacked by bears. Whatever the intention of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue cover this year, history will remember it as the ballad of Amy Adams.