“Even if your candidate didn’t win tonight, you have reason to celebrate,” Arianna Huffington wrote a little while ago. “We all do. Barack Obama‘s impressive victory says a lot about America. Because tonight voters decided that they didn’t want to look back. They wanted to step into the future. The history of America is studded with great breakthroughs followed by decades of consolidation and occasional regression. Tonight’s victory proclaims the end of the dark years of the Bush regression. It’s time for another American breakthrough.”

Whatever happened to the Bradley Effect? Has anyone seen it? Is it down at the liquor store picking up a couple of cases of Carta Blanca? Is it outside having a smoke?

MSNBC, CBS and Fox just gave Ohio to Barack Obama, and that, when you add in the Obama-leaning Florida and Pennsylvania already in the BHO column, is the whole magilla. Obama has this in the bag. New Mexico just went for Obama also. Forget it — McCain is done. Barack now has 200 electoral votes vs. 85 for McCain. I want McCain on that stage within two hours, no less, with a concession speech. I want his tail between his legs. Lie down, bitch!

What’s up with L.A. Times guy Patrick Day and World Entertainment News Network’s Kevin Lewin in Tom O’Neil‘s latest Gold Derby Oscar prediction chart? Seriously — what’s up with their waving off Kristin Scott Thomas‘s Best Actress chances? Neither are putting her in their favored five list? We need to mob up on these two, take ’em outside and slap ’em around.

Zack and Miri makers Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen riffing on a MySpace video about the “fat guys don’t get hot girls in real life” concept — a rebuttal of sorts to my views along these lines. They don’t mention HE by name, but I’m pretty sure they’re talking about my reviews of Knocked Up and Zack and Miri. “Who writes that?” Rogen indignantly asks. “Skinny guys who can’t get laid…that’s who.”

It is standard Hollywood policy to elbow big-name male actors into secondary character roles once they hit their late 50s. And so Dustin Hoffman, one of the all-time acting legends whose leading-man career went great guns from the late ’60s to the early ’90s, has been playing colorful oddballs over the last decade or so. The last time he had a lead role with a seriously dimensional beating heart was (am I wrong?) in Stephen Frears‘ Hero (’92).

But now he’s gotten hold of a solid lead role — a kind of soulful sad sack — in a modest but touching drama called Last Chance Harvey (Overture, 12.26). And it’s good to see Hoffman delivering again on this level. My guess is that others will concur. I’m not permitted at the moment to say anything about the film itself, but I can say this for sure — it’s agreeably restrained and well-mannered, and it doesn’t get in the way of Hoffman’s performance or that of his luminous costar, Emma Thompson.

As Harvey Shine, a Manhattan jingle writer on shaky professional ground, Hoffman hits a variety of notes that all say middle-aged downish — subdued, lamenting, glum, anxious, doleful, morose. But he’s determined to push all this aside and fly to London and attend his estranged daughter’s wedding. He’s not welcomed with open arms, having been a less-than-fully-loving and supportive dad, which is cause for more mood indigo.

And then, after he runs into Thompson’s Kate and starts to slowly succumb, Harvey (naturally, like anyone in his position) begins to warm up and radiate the good stuff. It’s like someone else is suddenly born within (as falling in love enzymes tend to manifest). He becomes likable, restrained, decent, manly, compassionate.

It’s a very pleasant arc, and is particularly seductive from a spectator standpoint since it allows — enables — one of our greatest actors to deliver a deeply winning performance.

There’s a third-act moment in particular when Harvey delivers a toast in front of a roomful of revellers at his daughter’s wedding reception. They’ve been treating him rather horridly and he’d be well within his rights, you think to yourself, to zap them back a little. But he doesn’t — and this is the moment when Hoffman and Harvey really won me over. The man shows class. He holds his ground and shows a touch of the gentle and the forgiving. He rises above.

It’s especially moving knowing that Hoffman, as he told me this morning, wrote this speech himself the night before filming. Along with his wife. Which goes to show that sometimes the stuff you write quickly with the pressure on (or the train coming round the bend) can work out very nicely.

I visited Hoffman at his Brentwood office this morning to talk things over. Here‘s the mp3, which I haven’t had time to edit. Yet. I have to bolt out of here and do errands but I’ll fill in with some more thoughts sometime later on. I can’t focus because of the election returns. I’m getting very anxious right about now.

Three Nickelodeon machines in the office suite of Punch Productions.

“Tim Robbins tried voting at his NYC polling place earlier today,” TMZ reported about an hour ago. “There was some kind of ruckus and the cops were called. Apparently Robbins has been voting at that polling place for more than a decade, but today his name wasn’t on the register.

“They told Robbins he had to fill out a provisional ballot but he didn’t want to do it. An argument erupted between Robbins and the poll worker. Robbins allegedly got loud and the poll worker said he was calling the cops. Robbins accused the poll worker of trying to intimidate him so he wouldn’t vote.

“Robbins [then] went downtown to the City Board of Elections to get proof he was good to vote.”

I arrived at the West Knoll voting location in West Hollywood at 7:02 am; I was out of there at 7:40 am. This guy kept coming out and saying “Orange table? Any orange tables?” I don’t know what orange meant but I was a green table guy. A nice vibe and thank fortune it didn’t take two or three or more hours.

This guy, this Doubt fan, keeps writing me about the film, acknowledging that I’m still under embargo but wanting to know if I think it’s a Best Picture contender plus an “actor’s movie,” or just the latter. It’s certainly an actor’s movie, I said, and arguably…make that certainly a Best Picture contender in that it serves a brilliant play with bracing clarity and authority, and when you throw in Roger Deakins‘ exquisite cinematography it’s a fairly impressive thing. A class act in every respect.

The guy’s latest inquiry is whether or not the ambiguity and suspense of the story (i.e., did he or didn’t he do it?) is still intact when film ends. He’s asking this because it’s been written by one or two persons who attended the AFI Fest screening that the suspense in the movie version is less than that rendered in the original stage play.

I answered that I asked director-screenwriter John Patrick Shanley about this angle at the AFI after-party, and that as far as he’s concerned the play and the film version deliver the exact same level of ambiguity.

Yesterday Daily Beast blogger/columnist Jessi Klein wrote a valentine to MSNBC’s David Gregory, whom I’ve written about myself.