For the last five years Melena Ryzik has been writing the N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” column, having inherited it from David Carr. But now Ryzik is bailing and handing the torch to Cara Buckley…congrats! It’s all a hustle for Oscar ad dollars anyway, but I’ve always found it irksome the way Carpetbagger columnists always jump into the award season in early December and go “tah-dah!…here we are!…let the games begin!” I wrote the following in response to Melena’s 12.4.13 piece called “Eyes On The Prize”: “Hardcore awards-tracking watchers and handicappers like myself and Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg have been riding the rails for over seven months now (i.e., since the 2013 Cannes Film Festival) and humping it extra-hard since Telluride, Venice and Toronto (or for the last 13 weeks), and then Melena comes breezing into the room with her video crew and writes, ‘The Oscars are not until March but the jockeying for position has already begun.’ Early December is ‘already’?”

New N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley…tah-dah!