If I were an Academy member and filling out my nomination ballot this weekend, as I presume hundreds are right now, I would go with The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, Dallas Buyer’s Club, American Hustle, Gravity, Nebraska, Captain Phillips and Before Midnight in my top Best Picture slots, in that order.

I hope it’s understood that any rationale or pretense for even half-respecting the Academy’s tastes will be null and void if voters don’t at least nominate Wolf for Best Picture. I know it can’t and won’t win, but Academy members will look like absolute fools (to history if not to the present-tense community) if they ignore it altogether. It’s the only world-class nitroglycerine movie out there, not to mention the only one that’s saying anything important in an immediate social-calamity sense.

WoWS is not about the big Wall Street players and the schemes that all but levelled the U.S. economy in 2008, but it’s certainly about American morals and values as they presently exist among the under-40 go-getters, and about a manifestation of the biggest social cancer afflicting this country today — the concentration of 1% wealth and general income inequality.

Ask Inequality For All‘s Robert Reich if Wolf isn’t the most important film of the year. Go ahead — call him. In fact, I’m going to call Reich and get a quoted opinion. I’d also like to get a response also from Oliver Stone, whose Wall Street (or more specifically Michael Douglas‘s Gordon Gekko character) was almost certainly an inspiration for Jordan Bellfort when he was starting out.