Last night Sasha Stone announced that after years of reluctance, she’s joined the Critics Choice Association — an accommodating, political-minded, awards-giving outfit whose leadership has recently come to believe they’ve supplanted the Golden Globes as the leading, default, go-to predictor of the Oscar awards.

And perhaps they have.

I was a CCA member for many years, going back to the mid or late aughts….I forget which. CCA honchos Joey Berlin and John DeSimio ejected me last March for a spurious reason that boiled down to a matter of political cowardice (theirs) in the face of woke hysteria.

I explained the deal in a piece I posted three months ago called “Hester Prynne Has Nothing on Yours Truly.” I quoted another person’s viewpoint, and posted it for an hour, and those beasts shot me in the stomach for it. So I stated unequivocally what I believed nine or ten months ago and what I believe today in my heart, which is that Joey and John and the people who pressured them are bad people (as in cowardly, hysterical, unprincipled, swinish, venal).

During a climactic sequence in The Bridges of Toko-Ri, a North Korean grenade lands near William Holden and Mickey Rooney in a muddy trench. Rooney lunges and throws it away before it explodes. Then another grenade lands — Rooney does the same and is killed when it explodes in his hand. If you were in that trench with Joey Berlin or John DeSimio, they would grab the grenade and throw it in your direction. Then they would toss their weapons, drop to their knees and beg the North Koreans not to shoot them.

That’s not saying much in a town like Los Angeles, I realize, but there it is regardless.