Oscar season's smear-outsourcing trend spreads today to Italy, where bizarre new allegations threaten to complicate — if not quite derail — Team Benjamin Button's fledgling comeback quest.

THR reports that an "office worker" and amateur screenwriter named Adriana Pichini claims Button is in fact an unauthorized permutation of her 1994 screenplay Il ritorno di Arthur all'innocenza, or Arthur's Return to Innocence. She's retained a powerful Italian movie-industry lawyer to shepherd her case, legal briefs for which have been filed despite the problematic matter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story and Eric Roth's own self-ripoff of Forrest Gump. (Never mind that Button has yet to even be seen in Italy; it opens there Feb. 13.)

No matter, we're told! Pichini registered her work 15 years ago, sent it off for (fruitless) consideration in the States, and no doubt bristled upon learning that her own epic's soulful gondola pilot had been corrupted as a salty testa di merda like Jared Harris. Surely Paramount and its international partners at Warner Bros. are none too pleased about the development — not when their 0-for-13 fears just received their most stirring rebuke yet from well-connected NYT observer Michael Cieply:

A lot of the mainstream players in these potentially Button-friendly blocs are a little sore at the Academy’s recent bent toward smaller films, which has been fed by an infusion of new members with roots abroad or in the independent film world. The mainstream people, at least some of them, may feel that a vote for a big, expensive picture with vast production values is the best way to protect their future jobs on big, expensive pictures with vast production values.

Fine with us! Adriana Pichini is at least as deserving of an Oscar as Diablo Cody was.