I’ve always been respectful of Tony Kushner‘s Lincoln screenplay, and have been presuming all along he’d win the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, at least as consolation for Lincoln not winning Best Picture. Sasha Stone predicts otherwise: “Kushner won’t win. Chris Terrio‘s Argo screenplay is going to win tomorrow at the WGA Awards and Kushner will lose the Oscar to Terrio.”

At least Kushner’s intelligence and perception is his own. He said the following on Charlie Rose the night before last:

“You could argue that Barack Obama faced in ’08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

“The fact of the matter is that when you’re elected president of the United States rather than king of the United States, you have to work with a very cumbrous, unwieldy machinery. Obama has made a very determined and conscious effort to keep saying over and over again: ‘Government is not the enemy. Government is an expression of the better angels of our nature.’

“You have people like these Tea Party people protesting government, and then asked if they really want to give up their Social Security payments and they don’t seem to know that that’s actually part of what government is. There’s this rejection of this sort of basic idea of human community.

“Now that we’re facing challenges like climate change that absolutely demands a global, collective response…we have no hope for survival as a species if we continue down the path of this kind of psychotic individualism.”

Stone again: “Argo is a film you can get all in one viewing — the jokes, the theme, the plot. It doesn’t require you do any of the work.”