Sci Fi has never gotten it's due respect with the Academy and there's no better film they could have been delivered to make up for that than Gravity. To me snubbing it will be equal to snubbing Star Wars. It needs to win the BP Oscar, but it probably won't.
Not really. It doesn't do anything particularly amazingly. Anyone should be able to expose the horrors of slavery fairly easily. It's not really a hard task to do.
I'm really surprised/disappointed Wadjda has been getting shut out of all the foreign noms. The movie was utterly charming and marked a huge milestone in middle eastern filmmaking.