The basic assumption is that the odds of Jennifer Lawrence‘s taking the Best Supporting Actress Oscar have dropped and that Lupita Nyongo‘s odds have been rising. Is this incorrect? Another view, shared earlier today, is that Lawrence shouldn’t get a second Oscar in a row and that the obliquely racist irritated-by-12 Years A Slave crowd feels a corresponding distance about Lupita Nyong’o and that Nebraska‘s June Squibb is something of a comer as a result. It’s just an observation, but this, at least, would be a huge defiance of conventional wisdom. I think Nyong’o is the most likely winner but I just want a surprise…any surprise.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

HE readers are hereby invited to predict the 2013/2014 Oscar winners in all the categories [nominees listed after the jump]. All submissions must be in by…I don’t know, Saturday, March 1st at midnight? The winner will receive either a cash prize of $100 or $125 or will be treated to a nice dinner or lunch by yours truly if he/she happens to live in Los Angeles. While we’re eating I’ll record our conversation and take pictures and make an article out of our encounter. Spell out predicted winners in BOLD CAPS. No revisions once you’ve sent in a list. The winner chooses the restaurant.

Non-Stop (Universal, 2.28) isn’t just the latest high-concept action flick starring Liam “Paycheck” Neeson. A new kind of “Die Hard on a jet airplane”, it has a dopey-sounding plot in which Neeson (playing a brawny air marshall) is not only trying to stop a blackmailing psychopath from icing a passenger every 20 mintues but clear himself of suspicion while doing so. Also collecting a check is 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o (no — I don’t think this is Nyong’os Norbit). Ditto Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery, Nate Parker (who was so great in Arbitrage), Linus Roache, Scoot McNairy and Corey Stoll.

2013 was the biggest and boldest year for African-American themes and filmmakers in Hollywood history, hence the deserved presence of 12 Years A Slave‘s Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mandela: Long Road to Freedom‘s Idris Elba, Fruitvale Station‘s Michael B. Jordan and Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o on the cover of Vanity Fair‘s Hollywood issue. But why include Mandela‘s Naomie Harris and 42‘s Chadwick Boseman? VF cover subjects for this annual issue are usually chosen because (a) they’re award-season contenders with serious heat or (b) are breakout types who seem likely to be players for years to come. No offense but very few conversation-starters were extra-lathered about Harris and Boseman’s performances. They may have great careers in front of them but people in my circle were not running around and saying “Naomie Harris is the next thing!” and “Chadwick Boseman killed in 42!”

So American Hustle is going to take the Best Picture Oscar…right? And I’m probably going to win that $50 bucks from Glenn Kenny after all. Or will Gravity take it? I don’t think so. I think the David O. Russell payback factor that I mentioned a long time ago (the quality and popularity of The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook added to Hustle means he’ll be almost unbeatable) was one of the reasons Hustle took ten nominations. How odd that Russell’s biggest-ever Academy contender is a film that I like and respect but don’t really love.

The Movie Gods want 12 years A Slave to win Best Picture, naturally. As I do. As a lot of people do. Can the softies be guilt-tripped into admitting that the film’s moral force plus the stunning cinematic artistry injected by Steve McQueen and John Ridley overwhelms or at least balances out the cruelty and brutality? I’d like to think so but…

At 23, Jennifer Lawrence has now been Oscar-nominated three times — for Best Actress in Winter’s Bone in 2011 and Silver Linings Playbook last year (resulting in a win) and now for Best Supporting Actress in American Hustle. She’s the youngest actress ever to have been so honored. Plus she’s really rich and hot and everything else. I loved her in Hustle also, but the award should go to 12 Years A Slave‘s Lupita Nyong’o.

Congratulations to the films that landed the most Oscar nominations this morning — 10 for Hustle and Gravity, 9 for 12 Years A Slave, 6 for Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club and Nebraska, 5 for He and Wolf of Wall Street. And extra double triple quadruple congrats to Wolf of Wall Street‘s Jonah Hill, who surprised everyone (even me) with a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Only one smarty-pants Oscar prognosticator — The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg — predicted a Jonah nomination.

I trust I’ve made myself clear over the past several years. I love writing this column 24/7 but “the season” — the six-month period between Telluride/Toronto/Venice and the Oscars — is where the real fun and thrills lie. And yet the idea of this same period consuming huge amounts of time and energy and incalculable brain-wave activity in order to predict which films and filmmakers that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will choose to give Oscars…what is that? I need to put this carefully. Covering the Oscar race pays pretty well, and for that I’m grateful. And I respect the fact that it’s a very, very difficult thing for a film to find sufficient acclaim to even get into the award-season conversation, much less become a finalist. There is real value in this, and each year serious payoffs are at stake. I don’t belittle this effort or the Oscar economy for a second.

But I do belittle the taste of those Academy members (i.e., not all) who have proven year after year that they have very little belief in serious Movie Catholicism, and that they basically regard the Oscars as a kind of high-school popularity contest. Yes, it’s always been this way but I think it might be getting worse. The King’s Speech and especially The Artist winning Best Picture took something out of me, and then the likable, perfectly efficient Argo after that…c’mon! And now the idea of an indisputable masterpiece like 12 Years A Slave possibly losing the Best Picture Oscar to a technically astounding, eye-popping thrill ride like Gravity plus the idea of Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio having to do interview after interview to try and persuade the Hope Holiday contingent that The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a celebration of vile behavior…I swear to God the doors of perception are narrowing.

Too many Academy members seem to favor films that provide an older person’s idea of emotional comfort (tearful sentiment, delivering some echo from their youth, resuscitating some facsimile of something well remembered) more than anything fresh or unusual or even semi-challenging. Not always but a lot of the time. This is partly if not largely due to the “deadwood” contingent — too many Academy members haven’t worked in the industry for too long, and their tastes are just too conservative and mildewed and doddering. Every year they bring everyone down.

Four good things came out of Sunday night’s Golden Globes Awards. 12 Years A Slave winning for Best Motion Picture, Drama inserted a helpful nudge factor in the deliberations of Academy voters who might otherwise be looking to blow it off because, as several award-season pulsetakers have noted, they feel it’s a morally urgent, award-worthy effort but too much of a grueling sit. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s win for Best Actor, Comedy/Musical was a significant score for The Wolf of Wall Street and an indication that he may land a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination. (This plus an expected Best Picture nom plus one for Best Adapted Screenplay and, if there’s a God of Fairness, a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Jonah Hill.) Ditto the Best Actress, Comedy/Musical win by American Hustle‘s Amy Adams…probably. And the Movie Godz completely agreed with Her‘s Spike Jonze winning for Best Screenplay.

The surprised but elated Slave gang after Sunday night’s win.

7:57 pm: WHAT? I spoke too soon! 12 Years A Slave takes the Best Motion Picure, Drama award? Yes! This wasn’t in the cards, or certainly didn’t seem to be. You can plainly see that director Steve McQueen is dumbfounded — “I wasn’t expecting this!,” he just said. An amazing finale….totally unexpected. And totally justified. Wow! Obviously a very close vote with Alfonso Cuaron having won Best Director.

7:51 pm: Jessica Chastain presents the Best Actor, Drama Golden Globe to Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyer’s Club. Good speech that he tried out last week in Palm Springs. 12 Years A Slave is most likely a total shut-out. We need to hear from Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, who declared last September that Slave was a total lockdown for Best Picture. McConaughey: “This film has always been about livin’…it was never about dyin’.”

7:46 pm: The great Cate Blanchett wins Best Actress, Drama for Blue Jasmine. Not too much of a surprise. Great speech! Admittedly augmented by “several vodkas.”

7:44 pm: “And now, like a supermodel’s vagina, let’s all give a warm welcome to Leonardo DiCaprio!” — Tina Fey.

7:39 pm: Here comes the Best Motion Picture, Comedy/Musical ward, presented by a pregnant Drew Barrymore (who looks as big as a house). American Hustle wins, of course. “Which movie will take the big award of the night?” the announcer asks. I think we have that figured out, right? Nothing to do with slavery! An FX-driven space suspense movie (“Sandra Bullock lost in a haunted house but the house is space” — Alexander Payne) is cooler!

7:27 pm: Jennifer Lawrence presenting the Best Actor, Comedy/Musical, and the Golden Globe goes to Leonardo DiCaprio!!! “I never would have guessed I would have won for Best Actor in a Comedy,” etc. In a general career sense, he means, but also because Leo regards Wolf, however hilarious it is throughout, as a deadly serious portrait of a malignant culture. Leo gives an elegant, eloquent acceptance speech. Being waved off by the orchestra. Yay, Leo!!!!

7:21 pm: Brooklyn Nine-Nine wins for Best TV Series, Comedy/Musical. “Winning this award is way better — way better! — than saving a human life!” the top guy says. What an asshole! The runners-up were The Big Bang Theory, Girls, Modern Family and Parks & Recreation.

7:17 pm: Gravity‘s Alfonso Cuaron takes the Best Director Golden Globe. Good technical job, Alfonso! Every “aaah!” from Sandra Bullock rocked my soul. So Gravity is going to win for Best Motion Picture, Drama? Nice one, HFPA! Well, we knew 12 Years A Slave was in trouble with this group. Cuaron’s “herpes”/”earpiece” joke was pretty funny.

6:57 pm: During her Woody Allen tribute acceptance speech, Diane Keaton contemplates death, or rather Woody’s famous remark about it: “I don’t want to live eternally through my work — I want to live eternally by not dying.” (Or words to that effect.) She mentions that while Francois Truffaut‘s films will be savored for a long time to come, “that’s not much help to Francois Truffaut.” (Whose grave, by the way, I visited back in ’87 — it lies in the Cimitiere du Montmartre.) Why did the sound cut out on Keaton’s speech? Two or three seconds were blipped out. Did she say something profane?

A 1.9 Daily Mail article by an anonymous BAFTA voter states — are you sitting down? — that “the voting process is based less on artistic merit than on a combination of coercion, trend-following and pot luck.”

“Maybe 100 films released over the past 12 months have a realistic chance of winning a BAFTA, and probably 70 to 80 of those are released in the last two months of the year,” the author says. “[And come December] you have 50 or 60 films to get through. In less than a month. With Christmas in the middle. And a deadline of January 3rd to vote for your five nominations in each category. It’s just not possible to watch them all. So which ones rise to the top of the pile? The ones you’ve already heard about. And the ones that have already started winning.

Ten years ago the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival was a respected, smartly-programmed venue for foreign films with a few celebrities and photos ops on the side. Now it’s a star-studded, rock-your-paparazzi, award-season megashow with A-class celebs, limos, security goons and guys like me taking pictures and…uhm, oh yeah, right, a smartly-programmed venue for foreign film on the side.

August: Osage County‘s Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep prior to last night’s Palm Springs Film Festival gala award ceremony. I only attended the after-party. Pic is totally stolen from JustJared.com.