I missed this 2.5 “Page Six” item about Tony Curtis dissing Brokeback Mountain. The remarks came from a recent interview Curtis did with Fox News critic Bill McCuddy. Curtis’s views — he hasn’t seen Brokeback and probably won’t, “[it’s] not as important as we make it… it’s nothing unique,” and “Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it” — suggest that Curtis, 80, is no longer thinking like the sharp cat he used to be. He can dislike Brokeback all he wants, but refusing to see it and invoking Wayne and Hughes is way of saying he prefers the sanctity of nostalgia to the alive-ness and prickly challenges of the present. (I called Curtis this morning at his home near Las Vegas to make sure he was quoted correctly and fully, but he didn’t pick up.) I met and got along with extremely well with Curtis six years ago when I met him for an interview in March 2000, and back then, when he was 74, he seemed like a different guy. “Curtis has always embodied a certain pugnacious cool, as palpable today as it was when he was starting to come into his own as an actor, in the late 1950s,” I wrote in my March 2000 piece, which I called “Cat in a Bag.” “Bluntness, ambition, class resentment, latent anger — these are fires that have always burned within Curtis, the man…and it seems to me they’re still there.” In a larger sense Curits’s remarks mean that the older, somewhat more conservative Academy crowd will be voting for Crash, which a journalist pal has described as “the middle-class Best Picture choice.”