I liked David Poland’s comparing the various Oscar bloggers to early ’60s Rat Pack members (Pete Hammond is Sammy Davis, Jr., David Carr is Dean Martin, I’m Bing Crosby, et. al.), but boy, is he wrong when he says the Oscar race “is a horse race” and “there is no Secretariat this year” and that “anything can happen.” I know it’s more fun to pretend the ball is still in the air, but that sad little flick about them cowboys jes poke-poke-pokin’ along has the Best Picture Oscar all but roped and tied, and for two reasons above and beyond the reviews and the critics awards and the guilds: (1) when sizable numbers of Average Joe’s in red-state areas went to see it last weekend, thus proving it’s not just a blue-state, big-city film, and (2) when the gentlemanly Larry Miller took it off the marquee in his megaplex in Sandy, Utah, it suddenly became The Movie That Got Shut Down by Red-State Bigotry, which of course gives a whole ‘nother dimen- sion. Now if you vote for ole Brokeback you’re socking it to Miller and his fat-cat cronies from Utah…yee-haw!