Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale has written a brief but amusing summary of the severe turns, lungings and lurchings in the Oscar race over the last week or so, and advised everyone — perhaps sagely and perhaps not — that “it’s a long race, and it’s closer than you think. Stuff you never thought could happen can happen and will happen.” (Like what, for example?) “Because anyone who insists he or she has the answer is, in reality, the most clueless one in the bunch,” he proclaims.

Quoting recent postings by myself, Tom O’Neil, Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg, Van Airsdale describes the “torrent of shock that washed away so much of peaceful, quiet Oscar Village after The King’s Speech‘s DGA and SAG two-fer last weekend” as a case of “mass panic.” I wouldn’t call it exactly that. I would call it mass shock, mass resignation and mass bitterness all thrown into the blender….ruuuhhrrrggghhh!

Either way it’s premature, Van Airsdale insists, because “excuse me…Oscar voters haven’t voted! The aforementioned guild overlap aside, there are literally hundreds of thousands fewer actors and directors in the Academy than in those guilds combined, and they don’t even have ballots in their mailboxes yet!”

“So float all the theories you want about Speech‘s ascendancy, sling all the mud you can at the new front-runner, and indulge all the hindsight you can muster. You may be right! But if this week has shown us anything, it’s that you never know. Either way, everyone — deep breaths! We’ve got three more weeks of this crap.”