During last night’s Contagion mixer a couple of folks were taking swipes at New York Film Critics Circle chief John Anderson for moving the org’s voting day to 11.28, or two days before the National Board of Review’s voting day of 12.1.

A couple of days ago Anderson was forced to delay the NYFCC voting by 24 hours (i.e., to 11.29) when Sony informed him that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo wouldn’t be ready for screening until 11.28. This was being pointed to as a sign that Anderson had overplayed his hand. “I guarantee you that next year the NYFCC date will be back to where it was before,” one guy remarked.

Maybe it will, and I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a good idea to ease up and arrange for all the big groups to start their voting on 12.5 or 12.8 — that sounds fairly sane to me. But somehow distributors found a way to work with the NBR’s 12.1 voting day in years past, so was it that crazy for Anderson to create a new NYFCC date that was only 48 hours earlier?