It might be premature to predict that 12 Years A Slave will win the Best Picture Oscar and that its director, star and female costar — Steve McQueen, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o — could take the Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress trophies. But having seen Slave I can say without question that it’s not crazy or unreasonable to imagine this. At all. And if you throw in those other spitball noms for The Butler‘s Forrest Whitaker (Best Actor) and Oprah Winfrey (Best Supporting Actress) and Fruitvale Station‘s Ryan Coogler (Best Director) and Michael Jordan (Best Actor) you’re talking about the strongest Afro-centric presence at the Oscars in Hollywood history.

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It’s obvious what Grudge Match (Warner Bros., 12.25) will be — leave it there. But what about the Sylvester Stallone-as-Edgar Allen Poe film that was never made and which we’ll probably never see? That would be a new kind of hip comedy. I can do a pretty good imitation of Stallone muttering “once upon a midnight duhweerhy…”

The 70% Rotten Tomatoes consensus is that Christian Vincent‘s Haute Cuisine (Weinstein Co., 9.30), which will have an invitational screening in Manhattan on Monday night, is a pleasant enough, true-life diversion for foodies. Synopsis: “Renowned Perigord chef Hortense Laborie (Catherine Frot) is appointed personal chef for French president Francois Mitterand (Jean d’Ormesson)…despite jealous resentment from the other kitchen staff, the authenticity of her cooking seduces the President, but the corridors of power are littered with traps.” The Real McCoy’s name was/is Daniele Delpeuch — for some legal reason they changed her name for the film. The trailer’s use of “These Boots Are Made For Walkin'” scares me to death.

Three or four days ago I was grappling with a screening conflict — John Ridley‘s All Is By My Side (a.k.a., the year in the life of Jimi Hendrix film with Andre Benjamin/Andre 3000 as the late groundbreaking musician) or Daniel Schecter‘s Life of Crime, the period kidnapping drama based on Elmore Leonard‘s The Switch. I compromised by deciding to catch the first 40% of All Is By My Side before Life of Crime began, but two or three minutes after settling into the Hendrix I was having doubts about this strategy because of Benjamin’s dead-on performance. It was obvious he’d captured Hendrix’s manner, vibe, voice…that gentleness, that ambivalent but spiritually directed mood-trip thing. Plus I was feeling a certain comfort with Ridley’s script and direction. I wasn’t knocked flat but I was saying to myself, “This kind of works…yeah.”

(l.) Musical-cosmic revolutionary Jimi Hendrix; ((r.) Andre Benjamin (a.k.a. Andre 3000) as Hendrix in John Ridley‘s All Is By My Side.

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My final Toronto Film Festival viewing was Simon and Zeke Hawkins‘ We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, and I must say it was nice to finish up with a little pulp-noir action and smart-director pizazz. A crafty small-town crime drama with a romantic triangle undercurrent and written by Dutch Southern (now there’s a name of a surly, swaggering, whiskey-sipping, Gauloises-inhaling, doobie-toking writer who drives a muscle car and wears motorcycle boots!), Place is technically an original tale but not really. For the main order of business (or so it seems) is paying tribute to the legendary hardboiled stylings of crime-fiction writer Jim Thompson, who is discussed in the opening chit-chat scene between lead protagonists Bobby (Jeremy Allen White, who eyeballs and mood-trips like a cross between Sean Penn and James Dean) and Sue (the pretty, antelope-like Mackenzie Davis). It’s like sitting in a film-school class with the teacher clapping his hands and barking “okay, get out your notepads, people…they’re making it easy for you!”

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John Turturro‘s Fading Gigolo is a gentle, Brooklyn-based, light-touch, indie-romantic fable. It’s a lot quieter and tenderer and less schticky than the trailer indicates. It’s appealing in a burnished, old-fashioned way, and it happens in a realm entirely (and in some ways charmingly) of Turturro’s imagining and making. The atmosphere is one of reverence, nostalgia, dignity, reserve, romance, class, kindness, caring, tradition. Eroticism, trust me, barely pokes through. The big standout element is gap-toothed Vanessa Paradis making her English-language debut. But this American Beauty-influenced poster makes no sense for a movie this discreet. I would go so far as to call it blatantly dishonest.

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I’m late to the table as this Kevin Smith “Fatman on Batman” podcast posted on 9.2, but it was mentioned today that Smith tells a funny story about myself and Ben Affleck and the old Dogma controversy, which I reported on during my Mr. Showbiz days, and which all came out of a round-table discussion during the Armageddon junket. Affleck denied it and called me a “chump” and a “chucklehead,” etc. Funny stuff, old water under the bridge, 15 years ago.

This is beyond picayune or peripheral but now that my Toronto Film Festival is almost over I thought I’d mention that for the last seven days or so I’ve been making instant coffee in my little apartment without stove-heated (or electric-heated) water, but with hot water out of the tap in the bathroom basin. And it hasn’t been that bad. A lot of spoiled people out there (I’m speaking mostly of wealthy boomers and older GenXers) go around every day demanding that their coffee-bean drink has to be served just so, and I’m just saying that the world would be a kinder, gentler place if they could dial some of that shit back a bit. I have fairly high standards when it comes to preparing or savoring good coffee, but anyone can adjust to anything if they’ve a mind to. I’m just saying that hot-tap-water instant isn’t so terrible. You just have to Zen up and suck it in.

“No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored.” — from Vladimir Putin’s Op-Ed piece in yesterday’s N.Y. Times.