All these Inglourious Basterds-may-win-the-Best-Picture-Oscar stories have become ubiquitous. In fact, if you’ve got Nicole Laporte, Patrick Goldstein, Tom O’Neil, Jack Mathews, Steve Pond and Pete Hammond saying the same thing, isn’t it fair to call it a blitzkreig?

And I’m feeling kind of hurt about this. How come I haven’t been called by Harvey Weinstein? I can bang this stuff out as well as anyone else. Here, listen: “Is this an excitement tremor or what? Inglourious Basterds is a come-from-behinder, a last-minute sprinter…breathless at the Kentucky Derby! The old ’90s Harvey is back in action! And Quentin’s no spin-slouch either!”

They haven’t called me, I’m guessing, because they see me as too much of a Hurt Locker guy. Too opposed to the baseball-bat scene, etc. But I could at least write about how Harvey has hijacked the Oscar-blog conversation. Even though, as I said two days ago, it’s mainly happening out of columnist boredom.

If I wanted to be contrarian, I could openly ask how Harvey got sop many people whose job it is to be skeptical to suddenly swig the Kool-Aid.

Or I could argue that Harvey has had an Oscar “upset” once in his career — Shakespeare in Love — and it wasn’t really an upset as the film did have the most nominations that year.

Or I could get pissy and argue that Harvey’s suggestion that actors are monolithically voting en masse for Inglourious Basterds because Quentin writes such good parts is arguably deluded if not offensive to almost everyone else in the race. I mean, to suggest that Jason Reitman or any of the other Best Picture screenwriters haven’t written good parts is like…hello?

And I could argue the idea that Inglorious Basterds is a consensus choice in the year of a preferential ballot is laughable. Isn’t any “love it or hate it” movie by nature not a consensus choice?

Or I could just quote this L.A. guy I spoke to this morning — call him a dispassionate pundit — who says that…uhm, well, actually, he goes on a bit so I’m going to give him a stand-alone HE berth. It’s in the story that follows (i.e., is right behind, even though it has a more recent time-code) this one.