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Tom Cruise‘s son should have never lived — it was ridiculous that he would have survived a pitched battle with Martian death machines. Seeing original War of the Worlds costars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson stepping out of that brownstone was like getting stabbed in the chest with a pencil. All because Steven “living incarnation of the spirit of Norman Rockwell” Spielberg had to deliver a heartwarming ending. Because he can’t help himself. Scenes like this are why Spielberg is regarded by perceptive types today (and will certainly be regarded by future film historians) as a hack. He is somewhere between the Cecil B. DeMille and the Mervyn LeRoy of our time. He had a brilliant run from Duel through Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and then it was mostly a bumpy downhill road, the exceptions being Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan and…you tell me. (Inspired by Grolschfilmworks piece called “Rubbish Movie Endings.”)

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The most deplorable incident of Russian arrogance and malevolence since the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia is about to happen. President Obama was on the phone yesterday with Russian president Putin for 90 minutes. If it had been me I would have said “C’mon, man, are you serious? What is this, the 1800s? What do you think you’re doing? Your guy was a Russian stooge. The new Ukrainian leadership is there as a result of a democratic process.” I wonder what Ryan Seacrest feels or thinks about this? (“Hello, Sandra Bullock…so tell us what you’re wearing!”) Somebody who wins an Oscar tonight should man up and say something.

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The legendary French director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year At Marienbad, Stavisky, Providence) has passed at age 91. We should all live so long and acquire the admiration and respect that Resnais had long been accustomed to. I couldn’t be bothered see his final film, Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter), at the Berlin Film Festival, and now I kind of regret that. I’m sorry, also, that I never saw Wild Grass, which screened at the 2009 Cannes Film festival.

Like Michelangelo Antonioni, Resnais began making films in the ’40s but didn’t achieve significant recognition until his short about Nazi death camps, Night and Fog, appeared in 1955, and he didn’t hit it big until Hiroshima mon Amour (the first adult film with sexually arousing passages I’d ever seen) and Marienbad, which excited and perplexed Cannes audiences when it played there in 1961. The last Resnais film that I was truly excited about was Mon Oncle d’Amerique. Marienbad in particular had a huge influence upon many filmmakers for its suggestion that memory is often if not entirely unreliable and that lives come into focus and then lose it in an instant. David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, among many others, drank the water from his trough.

Questions: Any chance the Academy will tell staff editors to insert Resnais into tonight’s “death reel”? Shouldn’t be difficult.

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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