This morning film reporter and essayist Lewis Beale sent me a 10.16 CNN.com piece he’s written about why people should see 12 Years A Slave. It’s a good article and well worth reading, but I told Beale that the most interesting part is the following: “12 Years A Slave tells us how we got to where we are today racially. It is not a story that Confederate flag wavers, states’ rights advocates, talk-radio stalwarts and all too many other Americans want to entertain. I can just hear them saying ‘slavery ended 150 years ago…get over it.’ It did and it didn’t. And that’s the point.”

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Fox Searchlight will open Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel on March 7, 2014. Ralph Fiennes has the lead role (a legendary concierge) in this 1930s period piece. All Anderson films are about sublime style (directorial, sartorial, production design, cutting, music) and that special serving of deadpan Andersonian coolness. Plus he almost always sticks with his stock company of refined, cultivated, X-factor hipster types (i.e., people with opaque or watercolor personalities and manners who “get” the Anderson thing). This time it’s F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson and Owen Wilson. (Anderson would probably never cast Jason Statham or Mo’Nique or Charlie Hunnam.) It’ll probably play the Berlin Film Festival in February, I’m guessing. Check out the mountains and the waterfall behind the hotel — pretty much the exact same landscape that towers over Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, which I’ve visited twice. A Grand Budapest Hotel trailer will pop sometime tomorrow morning.

Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.

An industry gadfly and Academy member who’s seen 12 Years A Slave wrote this morning and said three things: (a) “I am putting it at the top or near the top of my Best Picture nominations,” (b) “Boy, are you ever correct about Lupita Nyong’o” [being the leading Best Supporting Actress contender]…I can’t imagine any performance this year that will deny her that Oscar,” and (c) “Off the record, I talked to two fellow Oscar voters who’ve said they couldn’t stomach 12 Years. Another two walked out of it. Thought it was brilliant, but too much to bear. They all adore Gravity.”

I wrote right back and asked, “Can you tell me what these four do? What branch are they in? Writers, craftsmen, lighting guys…what? Break it down for me.” And he responded, “Two are in the writer’s branch, two of them are producers — all over sixty.”

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As Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg reminded on 10.13, there are six serious Best Picture hopefuls that haven’t been seen by most award-season handicappers: Sony’s American Hustle (which has recently had some test screenings in the El Segundo/Manhattan Beach area); Universal’s Lone Survivor (which will have its first media-invited screening at the end of the month); Sony’s The Monuments Men (research screened in Sherman Oaks last week, no media screenings until November); Relativity Media’s Out of the Furnace (slated for L.A.’s AFI Fest); Paramount’s The Wolf of Wall Street (which will be completed by Thanksgiving and released before the end of the year), and Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks (which is screening today in L.A.for select publishing elites and which will open AFI Fest on 11.7 but which Hollywood Elsewhere will be seeing and reviewing this weekend at the BFI London Film Festival — my flight leaves Friday at 5:45 pm).

I know this is the wrong thing to say and that it’ll make me sound like a pesky little gnat alongside the excellence of 12 Years A Slave and the greater context of its artfulness and social impact, but honestly? My first thought when the camera went in tight on Brad Pitt, who has distinguished and enobled himself for co-producing and co-starring in Slave, is that he needs to get a little more treadmill time in — no offense. He doesn’t look like Billy Bean here. This is what happens when you hit the big five-oh and beyond. You have to work harder to look your best. No biggie, just saying.

“It would be too easy to say that Spike Jonze‘s Her is about the new way we’ve found to fall in love — virtually. But it’s not improper to suggest that many of us are choosing not to engage with the world anymore. Maybe porn has become so readily available and satisfying that real people are unnecessary, real bodies are kind of a hassle. There’s that messy business with satisfying the other person, and the potential to be tossed aside for a more alluring lover. How much easier it is to nestle safely in the arms of a world that will never reject you because it doesn’t ask anything of you.

“There is nothing that can replace the warm flesh and blood of a lover in your arms — even with the complications, even with the inherent risks of getting hurt, even with the fear that you can’t be what they want. This is what we were born to do — fumble towards each other, make a big mess of our emotions. Fuck and laugh and argue. Maybe it all comes to nothing — but maybe, just maybe, you get to take part in the beauty of it all. The track marks of love are the bread crumbs left behind that take you back to the best places you’ve ever been. Reach for them. Hold them dear. Or die trying.” — from Sasha Stone‘s 10.13 riff about Her.

It’s strange, but I was kind of shocked yesterday (or was it the day before?) when I finally realized, more than two decades after she became famous on Seinfeld, that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is really, really loaded. She’s the daughter of billionaire Gerard Louis-Dreyfus, chairman of the Louis Dreyfus Energy Services. Forbes says her family is worth about $3.4 billion. Some superstars are worth $150 million or $200 million (i.e., Brad Pitt, etc.) but there’s something about the word “billion” that has a huge impact of some kind. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch her again in quite the same way.

In the view of New Yorker critic David Denby, All Is Lost “wouldn’t have been as moving with a man of, say, George Clooney’s age; it wouldn’t have had the nobility of endurance to the same degree. Now seventy-seven, Redford is in great shape, and the cheekbones and the jaw, despite a wrinkled shell, have held up—a visual sign of character surmounting age. The anxiety in his eyes as death approaches is unsettling, since it may be something that Redford the man feels, too. He does more acting in this movie than he has done in all his earlier movies combined. “

At last night’s L.A. premiere of 12 Years A Slave, director Steve McQueen, star Chiwetel Ejiofor and costar Lupita N’yongo were asked about Madonna having allegedly texted (and reportedly agitating those sitting near her) during a New York Film Festival screening. I didn’t think it was worth mentioning when I first heard about this. It’s obviously arrogant to text during a film, especially one as great and gripping as 12 Years A Slave. Madonna knows this, of course (she’s not stupid) but headstrong Type A’s sometimes do what they want and to hell with the rules. I’m wondering, however, why Madonna turned on her phone in the first place. I’m guessing she wanted a release from the intensity of the film, and is therefore may be a kindred spirit of the screenwriter I quoted yesterday. Which bothers me somewhat. Texting in theatres is like coughing during a play.

A respectful salute is hereby offered to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for laying her feelings on the line about Academy members who seem reluctant to even see 12 Years A Slave, much less afford it the respect and Best Picture consideration it obviously deserves. She was responding to the implications of Steve Pond’s 10.14 Wrap story about how a recent Academy screening of Gravity drew a huge crowd but only 500 to 600 Academy members showed up for Sunday night’s Slave screening –a respectable tally but obviously indicating a certain reluctance to see McQueen’s film given all the talk (which is 100% on-the-money) about it being a masterpiece and a Best Picture nominee slamdunk, etc.

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The All Is Lost team is indebted to Grantland‘s Mark Harris for completely dismissing the chances of J.C. Chandor‘s widely-hailed film (10.18) to even be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, although Harris puts Robert Redford at the top of his list of Best Actor contenders. This is how exceptionally good films get pushed off to the sidelines. Guys like Harris come along and go “very impressive but naaaah, don’t think so” and then the buzz starts to tilt a little more in that direction and before you know it it’s set in stone.

Note: In this piece I’m pasting DDI (i.e., Definitely Deserves It), SDI (i.e, Sorta Deserves It) and DRDI (i.e., Doesn’t Really Deserve It) after mentioning and/or discussing each film. Except, of course, for those I haven’t seen.

Harris’s list is a little weird in other ways, if you ask me.

12 Years a Slave (DDI) is his top pick, and yet Steve Pond’s 10.14 wrap piece provides yet another indication that Steve McQueen‘s masterpiece is encountering pushback from some complacent, brutality-averse Academy milquetoasts. Then comes Gravity (DDI) at position #2 (agreed — it’s a Best Picture lock) and the brilliantly composed but kinda-mid-rangey, not-exactly-earthshaking Captain Phillips in third place. The Butler (DRDI), a nicely-performed Black History Month high-school play captured on film, is Harris’s pick as the fourth likeliest Best Picture contender of 2013.

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Based on an original Cormaac McCarthy screenplay about a non-criminal (Michael Fassbender) getting involved with violent drug dealers, Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25) has been regarded from the get-go as a vague relation of No Country For Old Men, a violent drug-business tale based on a McCarthy novel. We all know that Joel and Ethan Coen always apply a dry, art-filmish tonality and that the less austere-minded Scott tends to aim for a kind of high-style pulp effect. A guy who’s seen The Counselor tells me the photography by Dariusz Wolski (Prometheus, Sweeney Todd) is beautiful, and that it contains (a) a noteworthy simulated sex scene involving a pantie-less Cameron Diaz and the windshield of a car and (b) a pleasant oral-sex scene between Michael Fassbender and Penelope Cruz.