IS this year’s Oscar race a straight three-way split — with David O Russell’s black comedy American Hustle and Alfonso Cuaron’s space thriller Gravity getting 10 nominations apiece, and Steve McQueen’s slavery-era drama 12 Years a Slave just behind with nine? It might, in fact, have revealed itself to be a two-candidate race, a straight-up competition between Entertainment and Seriousness, with the Entertainment vote liable to be fatally split between Gravity and American Hustle, leaving 12 Years a Slave likely to pick up most of the Oscars on the night?

Or maybe there will be a cunningly managed last-minute propaganda blitz, or cutely spun news controversy and there will be a landslide for one of the un-Serious films, leaving the Steve McQueen supporters (including myself) utterly outraged. Of course, even thinking in these crude competitive “scoresheet” terms is a very un-Serious thing to be doing, and the admirers of 12 Years a Slave may have a sinking feeling that it will not be properly rewarded in the tinselly, meretricious, un-Serious Oscar world.

For Sean Bobbitt not to get a nomination for cinematography is very perplexing and a very bad omen. Notoriously, Brokeback Mountain lost out to the moderate drama Crash in 2005 — although it is Brokeback which is still now hugely admired and Crash largely forgotten, confined to the DVD dumpbin of history.

Can it really be true that 12 Years a Slave — far and away the best film on this year’s Academy award nomination list — will fail to get the historic clean-sheet it deserves, and may even get humiliatingly overshadowed by the likes of American Hustle or Dallas Buyers Club? If that is the case, will it reveal the Academy to be guilty of bad or even reactionary taste?

It is very difficult to tell. But perhaps there was a moment during the recent Golden Globes ceremony which was a straw in the wind: Amy Poehler’s joke on the subject. She said that after 12 Years a Slave she would “never look at slavery in the same way again”. The presenters were careful to top this gag off by getting Tina Fey to give a stunned look at Amy, to make sure we realised the joke was about her goofy naivety, not any supposed obviousness or hectoring on the part of the film itself. But what was a joke could be a potential serious problem selling this movie to Academy voters who may not get round to watching 12 Years a Slave on their DVD screener copies. The media commentariat may be a lot more young, diverse and liberal than this electorate, which the Los Angeles Times last year revealed to be 94 per cent Caucasian and 77 per cent male with a median age of 62.

I say all this to pre-empt ill-fortune: I’m still hopeful that the first eventuality I outlined will prevail, that a combination of inadvertent tactical voting and aesthetic justice will mean triumph for Steve McQueen’s remarkable and, I think, historic film.

Otherwise, there are some interesting points: Philomena is in the running for best adapted screenplay and for Dame Judi herself as best actress, although it is disappointing that Paul Greengrass did not get a best director nomination for Captain Phillips. The nominations for Nebraska: Best Director (Alexander Payne), Best Film, Best Actor (Bruce Dern) and Best Supporting Actor (June Squibb) are very heartening, and reflect in what esteem this excellent film is held. In many ways, it would be great to see June Squibb get an Oscar and pastiche her speech in the aggressive style of her gloriously foul-mouthed character.

— By arrangement with the Guardian