Sunday’s Oscar Poker chat was obliged to focus on the significance of Alejandro G. Inarritu’s DGA win, which happened late Saturday night and which indicated to many (myself included) that The Big Short is all but dead in the water as a Best Picture contender, and that the final lap will almost certainly be a mano e mano between The Revenant and Spotlight. But after 15 minutes the discussion began to feel oppressively wonky with a torrent of precedents, statistics and inside-baseball speculation. “If I hear the term ‘preferential ballot’ one more time I’m going to start screaming,” I said. I really don’t like the way Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and Awards Watch‘s Erik Anderson often ignore or patronize the points that I make, and are often ganging up on me and trying to commandeer the discussion and suffocate the chimes of freedom flashing. Again, the mp3.