I wasn’t expecting Birdman to win the Best Feature Spirit Award. Very few were. The presumption was that the Spirits would probably embrace Boyhood, the ultimate indie-cred film of the year, especially after handing their Best Director Award to Richard Linklater at the midway point. But Birdman took the prize instead, and Michael Keaton won for Best Lead Male and Emmanuel Lubezki for Best Cinematography. The other big thunderclap of the day (unrelated to film) happened when Inherent Vice director Paul Thomas Anderson advised the audience not to fly American Airlines because “they will fucking lose your luggage…it happened to me.” [See video clip.] Why wasn’t Linklater in attendance? I heard he’s got a grudge against the Spirits, but no particulars beyond that. I did my usual “taking video while lying on my back” routine during the brief Birdman press conference that followed the Big Win. Birdman clearly has the heat, and yet I talked to four or five people today who believe a surprise could be in the offing.

The latest forecasts of Harvard-based Oscar odds-calculator Ben Zauzmer, whose calculations I began paying attention to three years ago, appeared three days ago in the Boston Globe. Nothing startling — Birdman, Inarritu, Redmayne, Moore, Simmons, Arquette, Lubezski — but Zauzmer, who’s now a senior, has an above-average track record. Is it accurate to call him the Oscar race’s Nate Silver? I’m mulling that one over.

“I had dreams as a child of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have to suffer the scrutiny that you did. What I did suffer when I was young was because I was sort of a hick coming into New York City. I was made fun of by a lot of the Factory people. Even Andy Warhol thought I was a hick. I met these people and I had to be strong. I had to either be crushed by these people or chop my hair up like Keith Richards and say ‘Fuck you.’ But that scrutiny is hurtful, and the rumor mill, the constant bullshit, speculations about your personal life must be very difficult. But in the end, all of that is peripheral. What will remain 20, 30 years from now…all those people and their snarky comments and their projections will be forgotten. But if your work continues to grow and you do great work, that’s what will be remembered. It’s all about work in the end.” — Patti Smith to Kristen Stewart in an undated but presumably recent Interview q & a.

“For a fair number of people who make their living by covering and/or predicting Oscars, this is one bunch of tired, shagged-out, bummed-out people, let me tell you,” writes RogerEbert.com‘s Glenn Kenny in a 2.20 post. “This is particularly true of the Oscar bloggers who are also Oscar partisans” — i.e., Sasha Stone, myself, et. al. One of the few not putting out “some form of distemper”, Kennedy concludes, is In Contention‘s Kris Tapley “who’s filing various guild award results with the machine-like efficiency of a minor character in The Front Page.” I’d probably feel morose if Kenny declared that I’m not quite on the level of Hildy Johnson, but maybe not. Maybe I’d shrug it off.