Fasten your seat belts, I think we’re going to have a couple of huge upsets to shake us out of the usual Oscar night doldrums — like “American Sniper” winning Best Picture and its star, Bradley Cooper, snatching the Best Actor trophy.

I am going waaaay out on a limb here — just a couple of weeks ago, I was predicting, along with pretty much everyone else, that “Birdman’’ was a lock for Best Picture because it had won prizes handed out by the triple crown of actors, directors and producers guilds.

Now I’m seeing Oscar prognosticators claiming “Birdman’’ is in a dead heat with critics’ darling “Boyhood,’’ with the 14 pundits at Gold Derby evenly split between the two.

But what really caught my eye was a tweet the other day by Mark Harris, one of the smartest and best-connected Oscar oracles: “Most Oscar voters I’ve talked to aren’t voting for ‘Birdman’ for Best Picture. The sense I get is that nothing has a majority, or close to it.”

This has been one of the weirdest Oscar seasons in memory, with “Boyhood’’ seemingly coasting to an easy victory, at least until it wasn’t. Attacks against the Best Picture nominees have been brutal and even bizarre — as polling was closing, one pundit not only labeled “Boyhood’’ racist but claimed it was somehow more offensive than “The Birth of a Nation.’’

No picture has been more slimed than “American Sniper,’’ with critics taking aim at Clint Eastwood’s conservative politics, the veracity of its dead protagonist, Chris Kyle, and even Kyle’s widow, with claims that she reneged on his promise to share royalties from the memoir on which the film is based.

When the film opened a month ago, I wrote that these shenanigans could backfire, and I’d wager they have. The academy might not be impressed by the many box-office records that “American Sniper’’ has broken, but it’s harder to overlook the huge cultural impact this serious film has had. And not just among Heartland audiences, as the film’s critics keep claiming.

I couldn’t put it better than an anonymous, longtime female Oscar voter quoted this week by the Hollywood Reporter: “It is literally the answer to a prayer for a mid-range budget movie directed by an 84-year-old guy to do this kind of business. It shows that a movie can galvanize America and that people will go if you put out something that they want to see.’’

And what they want to see is a film that depicts the cost of war to our veterans, as did previous Best Picture winners “The Best Years of Our Lives’’ (1947) and “The Deer Hunter” (1979).

The Oscar voter adds that “I can separate out the politics from the filmmaking,’’ and, as a liberal who put “American Sniper’’ on its 10 best list along with some other prominent colleagues, I don’t think this Oscar voter is alone. If Oscar pundits haven’t picked up a groundswell for “American Sniper,’’ it may well be because members — including the more blue-collar types in the crafts branches — don’t want to share their enthusiasm.

As for Cooper upsetting Eddie Redmayne and Michael Keaton — who are also described as being a dead heat, although, as usual, nobody has access to any actual numbers — this clicked for me on Sunday night. Cooper, who gives the performance of his career as Chris Kyle, spent the night off from “The Elephant Man’’ kissing Betty White on the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary special. This aired right after a “60 Minutes’’ segment on him — two nights before the Oscar polls closed.

I’m not saying you should bet the mortgage, but 75-to-1 odds for both “American Sniper’’ and Bradley Cooper sound awfully good to me. Though I briefly handicapped horses as Longshot Lou decades ago, this is my boldest prediction since I (pretty much alone) prophesied that Adrian Brody would win Best Actor 12 years ago.