The hell with it: I’m switching my Best Picture prediction to Little Miss Sunshine.

An older friend told me this morning “it’ll probably be The Departed,” pointing the tendency of older Academy members to shy away from comedies in choosing Best Picture winners plus the lack of Sunshine Best Director and Editing noms, blah blah.

I say throw out the stats. The bottom line is that we’re living in weird times. Everyone knows the world is coming to an early end unless some big changes, and Bill Maher was totally dead-on the other night when he said that if people knew or an absolute fact that not using their TV remotes would eliminate global warming completely, that most people would still use their remotes. And yet people are also quietly freaking inside and want a measure of emotional comfort more than anything else when it comes to anything and everything, including the matter of Best Picture.

So the hell with the precedents and stats — Little Miss Sunshine is the only “us” movie with a Best Picture nomination. It’s not as moralistic or grounded as Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment, but that was a “dark comedy” that won the Best Picture Oscar 46 years ago. Sunshine is light-ish, yes, but it’s fundamentally a serious comedy about losing, hurting, despair and darkness, but finally about family love and sticking up for one another, and I think it’s going to win because of this combination. I really do. If I’m wrong, screw it….I don’t care.

If the Best Picture choice of the majority is going to be/has been about selecting the film with the most accessible emotional current (i.e., one that fulfills and satisfies by affirming some commonly-shared realization about life as Academy members know it), then Little Miss Sunshine is going to win the Best Picture Oscar tonight. “If,” I say…

We all know that the statistics are against it with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris not having been nominated for Best Director and the film also not receiving a Best Editing nomination. I don’t know how to calculate this…nobody knows. At the very least tonight’s Oscar show is going to be the best in many years because of the Best Picture headscratcher factor. It’s a real cliffhanger and a puzzler.

Repeating the basics: my personal preference is for The Departed to win because it throttled me in a richer, artier and more dazzling way than any other film. But I’d be perfectly delighted if Little Miss Sunshine takes it because it resonates thematically, it understands itself perfectly, and scene-for-scene and line-for-line it shoots one bulls-eye after another (except for the motorcycle cop-and-the porn magazine bit and the deux ex machina of the ex-boyfriend at the gas station).

One thing for sure (I think, I suspect…maybe) is that I was probably wrong in predicting Babel to win Best Picture. It’s almost definitely going to be The Departed or Little Miss Sunshine, and I have to make a final, final call within the next few hours.

Little Miss Sunshine won the Spirit Award for Best Picture yesterday, and with that an extra-special hooray for Academy-snubbed producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, who ought to take the stage tonight at the Oscar and when LMS wins Best Picture. Sunshine helmers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris also won for Best Director, and Sunshine author Michael Arndt won for Best First Screenplay.

Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt prior to yesterday afternoon’s Spirit Awards — Saturday, 2.24.07, 1:15 pm

Sunshine producers Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa after the big Sunshine wins — Saturday, 2.24.07, 4:12 pm

The wi-fi in the big Spirit Awards tent was twitchy — worked, didn’t work, sorta worked — so I threw up my hands after 40 minutes or so of futzing around. And then it was party time at Shutters for two, two and a half hours, and then a 90-minute horizontal…forget it. I blew it, slacked off, dropped the ball and, from a filing perspective, basically shined my Hollywood Elsewhere responsibilities.

The Lives of Others director-writer Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck fielding questions in the rear press tent at the Spirit Awards — Saturday, 2.24.07, 3:25 pm

But a 20-gun salute to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and The Lives of Others for having won the Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film. The odds, of course, have been telling us for several weeks that the great Pan’s Labyrinth will take the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar tonight, but I’m sticking with The Lives of Others on my ballot, even if it means losing money. Because Others has, for me, a better, more satisfying ending.

I’m not revealing anything if you’re watching the Spirit Awards on IFC, but it’s 3:36 pm — the show’s been running for 90 minutes — and the winners so far that I admire and care about a lot are (a) Little Miss Sunshine‘s Alan Arkin, Best Supporting Male; (b) Michael Arndt, Best First Screenplay, Little Miss Sunshine; (c) Frances McDormand, Best Supporting Female for Friends With Money; Shareeka Epps, Best Female Lead for Half Nelson; Florian von Henckel Donnersmarck, director-writer of The Lives of Others, winner of the Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film; and Guillermo Navarro, winner of the Best Cinematography Spirit Award for Pan’s Labyrinth.

I’m heading over to Santa Monica and the Spirit Awards tent around 11 ayem or so, Stand-up, stroll-around schmooze time happens between 12 noon and 2 pm, which is when the show goes on the air on IFC channel (5 pm eastern). There’s also some kind of live webcast thing going on via www.ifc.com.

I’m bringing the laptop with a hope that some kind of wi-fi will be available. The Bagger says he’ll be blogging from the press area so maybe he knows something. If the wi-fi”s happening I’ll do my best with the pictures and potshots. I don’t know about blogging from the big, noisy, super-crowded after-party at Shutters — that may be pushing it.

“The first, flat-out great film of 2007, David Fincher‘s spine-tingling Zodiac is a 158-minute, decades-spanning movie about one of America’s most notorious serial killers,” writes Boston Herald critic James Verniere. “This is the GoodFellas of psycho-killer thrillers.

“A remarkably accomplished, measured and mature procedural, Zodiacis to Se7en — Fincher’s 1995 breakthrough effort — what the real-life case is to Dirty Harry, Don Siegel‘s great, lurid 1971 classic, featuring a Zodiac-like killer played by Andy Robinson.

“In many ways, Zodiac is Se7en stripped of its exploitation trappings, creepy credit sequence and twist ending and transformed into a great American crime epic.

“Fans of Se7en and Fight Club may be befuddled by this somber, ambiguous work. Zodiac unfolds in a creepy, real retro-world, where jurisdictional anomalies and bad record-keeping make life miserable for the good guys. The film is a tale set in an Analog Age when crime detection is the stuff of shoe leather, ink, paper and pastel-blue, rotary dial phones.

“The truth is out there, all right, and it will kill you.”

When shooting on Zodiac finally ended, director David Fincher “found himself sifting through the digital equivalent of 1.3 million feet of film, enough footage to fill two features,” writes EW‘s Benjamin Svetkey in the current issue. “After months of slicing and dicing, he emerged from the editing room with a cut of Zodiac that ran a tick over three hours.

“Even he knew it was too long, so the movie’s original fall 2006 release was pushed to January, then to March, to give Fincher time to make more trims.”

Why are we stuck with outmoded, old-hat concepts of releasing movies, concepts that are out of synch with the various-choice options available through DVD? Fincher shouldn’t have been pressured to trim Zodiac down to 160-plus minutes because it wasn’t necessary. If it had so decided, Paramount could have easily put out the shorter version in general release while simultaneously releasing the three-hour version is select big-city theatres. Why not?

A friend who saw a somewhat longer version of Zodiac (maybe 10 or 12 minutes longer than the version hitting theatres on 3.2) told me a while back that he likes it more. Sometimes longer is just longer, but I have a feeling that people like myself may possibly enjoy the 180-minute version even more when it hits DVD.

“‘We had to lose a lot of connective tissue and a lot of little character moments,’ Fincher says with a sigh. Among the victims: Robert Downey Jr., as a boozy San Francisco reporter, lost three scenes, including “a great one of him sleeping in his car,” according to Fincher.”

“Many of Nikki Finke‘s spoilers are accurate, but some are not,” writes Envelope contributor Steve Pond declared last night. “Don’t believe what she says about all acting awards being pushed to the last third of the show.” The Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards, he means.

“Were you ever raped by Eddie Murphy or what? He must have done some kind of personal bad to you. Having said that, boy, do I ever agree with you. That guy is a world-class arrogant prick. If he wins this he’ll be impossible to live with. He also does not deserve it. Its a shallow bullshit performance that is meritorious only for his musical and dancing talents. I said Arkin weeks ago.” — e-mail received this morning from a director friend who’s obviously not to be trusted despite first-hand experience.

“[Oscar voters] tell the pollster, you or whomever, that they are voting for the serious gravitas-filled downer, Babel. But, mark my words, they are secretly voting for the pic that is their guilty pleasure, either Sunshine or Departed.'” — posted by a N.Y. Times reader named Judy in response to a “Bagger” piece. Something about the conciseness and sense of certainty in this remark has given me pause. I’m suddenly thinking I might be wrong in predicting Babel to win. I need to think this over.

“Oh. she’s an inninvala, invala…an invalid…it’s practically like living alone.”