Is it me, or is this “Dining With Barry & Barb” scene from This Is 40 one of the best scenes from the material that Judd Apatow shot, even though it didn’t make the final cut? Apologies for being seven days late but as perverse, lifeless and emotionally shut-down as it sounds, the “expecting and offering nothing leads to serenity in a marriage” rap is at least a novel concept, and one that I’ve never heard voiced in a film before.

To everyone’s surprise it has become increasingly evident that Lincoln will most likely fail to take the Best Picture Oscar. It is respected and liked, but not really loved. And it looks more and more like Argo might take that award. [Note: Apologies for idiotic, now-deleted info posted a few minutes ago.]

It’s not that the BFCA/Critics Choice or the HFPA Golden Globe awards are Academy influencers, per se. It’s the fact they both chose Argo for Best Film and Affleck for Best Director, and that means that Argo pollen is in the air, and they both sneezed in unison. It’s the pollen, it’s the pollen….the pollen is the thing. If the Producers Guild becomes the third organization to go “ah-choo” over Argo, the game is over.

I’m more of an Argo admirer than a lover or worshipper as Zero Dark Thirty is clearly a much tougher and more riveting film, and generally a higher, greater achievement, but if it has to be Argo then so be it. I’d rather see Silver Linings Playbook take the prize for emotional reasons, but I’m nonetheless willing to fall on the Argo sword if that helps, even a little tiny bit, to fulfill my most ardent wishes in this race, which I don’t need to elaborate upon.

I suspect that Bill Clinton‘s Lincoln endorsement during last night’s Golden Globes telecast pretty much decided that Lincoln‘s and Spielberg’s fate, but you tell me.

All kinds of things to attend to as I leave tomorrow afternoon for Park City and the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It’s hard. A growing sense of bats swirling around my life, wings flapping….flap-flap-flap-flap-FLAP-FLAP-FLAP! Struggling as we speak. Thinking, examining, researching as fast I can. Several phone conversations this morning, and none of them leading anywhere.

I should have posted a link to last Friday night’s Charlie Rose Show discussion of the Oscar nominations by now. N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott; New Yorker critic David Denby (a Silver Linings hater save for Jennifer Lawrence); Slate‘s Dana Stevens and Annette Insdorf of Columbia University. The thing to listen for, as always, are the implied views rather than the stated ones…but you knew that.

Before driving down to the police-state fortress that was the Beverly Hilton and the Golden Globes awards, I spent two and a half hours on my back underneath a friend’s house, crawling around inside a sprawling dark space that was maybe 20″ high and wearing a surgical mask and a hat and tinted shades as me and two other guys put pink insulation strips between the floor beams. There were piles of dirt on top of the cross breams and every time we pushed through the strips soil poured onto my head, face and neck. I felt like Charles Bronson as Danny the tunnel king in The Great Escape.

I don’t know for a fact that Steven Spielberg arranged for Bill Clinton to come to the Golden Globes and speak admiringly of Lincoln the president and Lincoln the film. But it seems like a pretty good guess that he did. Bill was eloquent as usual, but what was the effect of his testimonial? People realized that Spielberg wants Oscar glory really badly this time, and will cash in any I.O.U.’s, political or otherwise, that might help in this regard.

Argo winning Best Motion Picture, Drama and Ben Affleck winning for Best Director tonight came right on the heels of the BFCA Critics Choice awards deciding to give the same awards, and I think that tore it. I think everyone except for the Lincoln die-hards realized tonight that Lincoln doesn’t have the horses to win the Best Picture Oscar, and Spielberg is probably out of the running also. And the reason for the latter, I think, is that he looked scared tonight. Playing the Clinton card was basically Spielberg saying to himself, “How do we shake this race loose and tip it in our favor? Obviously we have support but possibly not enough. That fucking Critics Choice Argo win didn’t help any. I know…I’ll call up Bill Clinton and have him make a pitch for it!”

It’s now Argo in the lead for Best Picture vs. Silver Linings Playbook with Lincoln in third place.

I dislike movies that exploit fear of evil predators and general undercurrents of dread. You can’t be Pollyanna and you have to be careful, but you also have to understand and accept the fact that the vast majority of people are reasonable and considerate. You can’t live in a fear cage. You can’t live life like a deer drinks from a stream in the forest, always looking up every two or three seconds to make sure a predator isn’t approaching.

Every now and then I get this Tony Soprano anxiety thing in which you can’t stop scratching your arm or your leg. No matter how hard you scratch it still itches. You have to use kitchen knives to make it go away. It happened again last night. I used Tony Soprano’s name because when I saw him constantly scratching his arm during the first or second season of The Sopranos I recognized myself.

What I realized last night is that the scratchies can be (or perhaps always are) specifically linked to something you’re nervous about but have been suppressing. I used to think they just happened when they happened because they felt like it.

During last night’s Jerry Lewis Cinefamily tribute “the normally taciturn Lewis, answered a question about The Day The Clown Cried by saying that he objectively looked at the movie and felt it didn’t work…and [therefore] it would never see the light of day,” a friend informs.

The 85 year-old Lewis “shot many questions down, saying it would take too long to get into,” the source adds, “but he offered a lot of cool stuff” including that that he was originally offered to direct Take the Money & Run and decided no and then urged Woody Allen to do it.

Due respect to tonight’s Golden Gobes co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but I suspect (we all suspect) their opening monologue isn’t going to be as snarky or ill-mannered or snap-crackle-pop as Ricky Gervais‘ material was 12 months ago. Good comedians say the things we think but wouldn’t dare say in mixed company. Funny is dangerous taunting in a subtextual way, coming close to a defamation-of-character lawsuit, dancing on the edge of a slippery cliff.

I’ll be attending a Fox Searchight viewing party (starting just before 5 pm Pacific) and then hitting the after-parties. But first I have to crawl under a friend’s house and put up floor insulation with a staple gun.

Tonight’s big question is whether or not Les Miserables wil enjoy its “last grand hurrah” (in the words of TheWrap‘s Steve Pond) by taking the Best Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical award, or whether Silver Linings Playbook, the galloping momentum horse of the moment, will snatch it away.

The point of the Golden Globes “is that the show is a party, that it’s looser than the Oscars – much is made of the fact that they serve alcohol at the tables – and that its results are essentially insignificant, because even the people winning the awards know that the voters are 80-odd junket-loving correspondents for foreign newspapers and magazines who do not exactly have critical or professional credibility,” Pond writes.

“Would the Oscars put up with a host implying that their award was for sale? The Globes not only did that with Ricky Gervais, they invited him back to savage them twice more. Even the HFPA knows that it’s about looseness and fun and ratings and that TV money. It’s about creating only a paper-thin illusion that the show means something, knowing that the only folks who buy it are the ones who aren’t really paying attention.”

Earlier today Academy members received an email from Hawk Koch announcing that everyone will be permitted to vote for Best Documentary Feature, Best Live Action Short and Best Animated Short, and that everyone will be sent screeners of the nominees. No longer will a few hundred voters, if that many, determine the results in those races. “Remember that documentary and shorts producers usually don’t have money for cab fare, let alone the cost of sending screeners to 6,000 Academy members,” a tipster comments. “So who’s footing the bill? Presumably the Academy, and that’s the headline. Good for them.”

HE commenter “Tuan” has been removed from the premises. I never liked his handle and too many of his posts rubbed me the wrong way. He was bringing the conversation down, man! What finally tore it was his subject-changing comment about the passing of Jon Finch, which I mentioned last night. Tuan ignored Finch and said “speaking of Shakespeare, Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous is a fine, fine film. Probably the most surprising film I saw in 2011. It’s a shame that more people didn’t like it because of its conspiracy angle.” That was it. I won’t have this inanity.