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In the wake of 12 Years A Slave winning five Spirit Awards yesterday afternoon (Best Feature, Director, Supporting Actress, Screenplay, Cinematography) and feeling all the audience love and the relief and joy from the filmmakers about having scored big-time, I began to think about what may happen this evening at the Oscars. About what I fear will happen. For in the minds of many millions the Academy will be revealing a self-portrait if they give the Best Picture Oscar to Gravity in this, the year of the greatest surge of top-quality African-American filmmaking in Hollywood history and especially this one masterful film — the first indisputably artful drama about 19th Century slavery in America, not so ironically directed by a Brit.

12 Years A Slave producer and costar Brad Pitt, costar and Best Supporting Actress winner Lupita Nyong’o in Spirit Awards press tent after their big win.

Because if the worst comes to pass the main impression won’t be that Gravity has won. The main impression, trust me, will be that the old-white-fart Academy has frowned upon one of the greatest, saddest and most compassionate films about human dignity and one man’s unquenchable desire to live and not just exist. In so doing the Academy’s epitaph will read as follows: “Okay, look, we know 12 Years A Slave is a very well made film but we’re the smug Academy and we just didn’t like it…okay? Too downish, too brutal and our wives wouldn’t even watch the screener. We don’t like thinking that the culture of Scarlett O’Hara was this cruel, this heartless. It brings us down. So we’d rather give the Best Picture Oscar to a beautifully composed space thriller with Sandra Bullock tumbling weightless and going ‘aahh! aahh!'”

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There’s no shame in Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst Scott Feinberg reversing himself on an earlier prediction. I’ve been a Lupita guy all along. I find it more than a little offensive that people would brush her 12 Years A Slave performance aside for JLaw’s amusing but not very substantial turn in American Hustle. Then again the Academy’s Twilight Zone-ish awarding of a second acting Oscar to Christoph Waltz…forget it, I’ve already made this analogy.

I’ll be driving over to the Patton Oswalt-hosted Spirit Awards in Santa Monica around 10:15 am. Chilly temps and rainy weather obviously mean suppression as far as the outdoor schmoozy stuff is concerned. (Phase One is a 150-minute party starting at 11 am; Phase Two is the show’s taping from 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm.) Alexander Payne, Cate Blanchett Jeff Nichols, Bruce Dern, Matthew McConaughey, J.C. Chandor, Steve McQueen, Lupita Nyong’o, Richard Linklater, Robert Redford and dozens of other distinguished coolios will be milling around. The show will air on IFC tonight.

My know-nothing predictions:

Best Feature: 12 Years A Slave, All Is Lost, Frances Ha, Inside Llewyn Davis, Nebraska. Predicted Winner: 12 Years A Slave. This seems certain as the Spirits will want to set themselves apart from the old-fart Academy members who either don’t “like” Slave (largely due to resentment of the film’s mostly negative portrayal of whites) or haven’t even watched the screener.

Best Director: Shane Carruth (Upstream Color); J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost); Steve McQueen (12 Years A Slave); Jeff Nichols (Mud), Alexander Payne (Nebraska). Predicted Winner: Most likely McQueen but possibly Payne.

Best Female Lead: Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine), Julie Delpy (Before Midnight), Gaby Hoffmann (Crystal Fairy), Brie Larson (Short Term 12), Shailene Woodley (The Spectacular Now). Predicted Winner: Will the Spirits copycat the Oscars by awarding Blanchett, or will they do the better identity thing and give the award to Brie Larson? Fearing the former, hoping for the latter.

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Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf, New York critic David Edelstein and Wall Street Journal/”Speakeasy” editor Christopher John Farley spoke about the Oscars last night on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.” Hayes asked them to discuss (a) an actual Oscar ballot released by an anonymous, smug-minded Academy member to The Hollywood Reporter, and (b) the relatively low bar that tests a film’s gender bias.

Slate‘s Amanda Hess has posted an article about what Cate Blanchett should say (or not say) when she wins the Best Actress Oscar Sunday night. Hess suggests that Blanchett might be damned if she thanks director-writer Woody Allen and damned if she doesn’t. I’ll tell you what won’t work, and that’s what Blanchett said when she collected her Outstanding Performer of the Year award at the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. She confined herself at that moment to thanking her Blue Jasmine costars, almost certainly because Blanchett and her publicist had calculated that mentioning Allen that night (only hours after Dylan Farrow’s letter had appeared in Nicholas Kristof‘s N.Y. Times column) would be unwise. It would obviously be ungracious to not mention Allen tomorrow night. On top of which the Dylan-Mia-Ronan brouhaha has been losing steam for two or three weeks now. (It peaked when Allen responded to the charges in a N.Y. Times-published letter.) Blanchett’s Oscar is about what she did with an Allen-created character. It’s finally about her craft but on the other hand she can’t imply that her performance just happened on its own.

Posters for the Best Picture nominees have been created by ripping off the stylings of the late Saul Bass. These are the only ones that are half-clever.

A wealthy friend recently asked me to try to help her score tickets to the Oscars and to the Vanity Fair after-party. I asked around and quickly learned it’s a dicey thing to even ask about. Nobody wants to go there. It’s obviously declasse to attempt to buy tickets to events that are for invitees only. I was about to give up and tell my friend “sorry”, but then I checked Craigslist. I found a guy who claimed to be selling legitimate tickets to the Oscars for $38K a pop and to the Vanity Fair after-party for $40K each. I was astonished at these prices (don’t the Oscar security guys require ID?), and so was my friend. She backed off. The Craigslist scalper called this morning and confirmed the above prices. I don’t know if he’s actually in a position to deliver legitimate tickets or not, but he claimed there are buyers out there who would pay such amounts. He also claimed there are three or four brokers besides himself who are selling tickets to these events at similar prices.

Best Picture: It pains me to predict this but Gravity will probably win, despite the lame-ness and the wrongness of such a choice. Should win: Wolf of Wall Street or 12 Years a Slave. I know I’ve predicted 12 Years to win but…I don’t know what’s going to happen. But a gut feeling is telling me to prepare for the worst.

Best Director: Like everyone else, I’m expecting Alfonso Cuaron to come out on top. Not for directing one of the boldest and finest films of the 21st Century, Children of Men, but for directing a technically dazzling “Sandra Bullock in a haunted house but the haunted house is space” movie. Should win: Martin Scorsese for Wolf or Steve McQueen for Slave.

Best Actor: Dallas Buyers Club‘s Matthew McConaughey, of course, but Leonardo DiCaprio‘s balls-out performance in The Wolf of Wall Street is more deserving.

Best Actress: Cate Blanchett, of course, for her work in Blue Jasmine. Should win save for the fact that she wasn’t nominated: Blue is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos.

Best Supporting Actor: Dallas Buyers Club‘s Jared Leto, although there’s no question in my mind that WoWS‘s Jonah Hill gave the richer and more vivid performance.

Best Supporting Actress: The most deserving nominee is 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o but I fear that American Hustle‘s Jennifer Lawrence will take it nonetheless. The Academy that gave Christoph Waltz two Oscars for playing more or less the same kind of character twice in two Quentin Tarantino movies is more than capable of blowing off Nyong’o.

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I was 14 or 15 when I first saw Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings (’39). I liked it right away. I’ve probably seen it ten or fifteen times since. And the older I get the better this film seems. I think it’s because the classic themes — the Hawksian code of professionalism, “Who’s Joe?”, “He just wasn’t good enough” — mean more now that I’ve learned first-hand what “good enough” and “not good enough” are. I’ve been up and down and through it all. I’ve been used, pursued, abused, subdued, sued and tattoed. I’ve climbed rocky cliffs at night in the rain and have passed muster. Now I know what the movie is really saying.

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I’m so sick of the Oscar race (and particularly of reading Oscar nominee suck-up pieces on Hitfix.com) that I’m not even going to post the winners in the Oscar Balloon, as I’ve done in the past. I’ll just post them as a story and that’ll be that. Instead I’ll be re-posting HE’s Projected/Likely 2014 Highlights roster. Before it goes up I’m asking once again for additions and suggestions. Which films belong under the Presumed High-Pedigree, Respectable Second Tier and Third-Tier Megaplex categories? I’ve obviously made my determinations but maybe I’ve got a few wrong.

Presumed High-Pedigree: Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, Ridley Scott‘s Exodus, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, David Fincher‘s Gone Girl, Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar, J.C. Chandor‘s A Very Violent Year, Jean Marc Vallee‘s Wild (i.e., the Reese Witherspoon hiking drama), Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young, Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups (or the other “intersecting love triangles” Austin-based film that still doesn’t have a title…or both), Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special, Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes, Noah Baumbach‘s Untitled Public School Project, Phillip Noyce‘s The Giver, Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, Todd Haynes‘ Carol, Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth, Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken. (20).

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I don’t know what Charlie Kaufman‘s Anomalisa will be about, but I’m presuming it’ll have something to do with Kaufmanland, which is to say glum, sardonic humor mixed with morose, middle-aged loneliness and ennui and being haunted by death and looking at pink piss in the toilet bowl, etc. Kaufman is one of our greatest, most original-thinking screenwriters (I will worship Being John Malkovich and Adaptation for the rest of my life) but as a director he seems to have a strange longing for obscurity if not self-obliteration. How else would you describe a guy who titles his films Synecdoche and Anomalisa? Rule #1 in deciding on a movie title is “make it easy to remember.” Rule #2 is “don’t choose a one-word, five-syllable title that nobody on the planet earth has ever heard before…that doesn’t exist in Webster’s dictionary.” I’m posting this out of genuine concern.