The rumpus started this morning just after the SAG nominations. It began with my being surprised by the fine-but-unexceptional performance by Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out being nominated for a SAG Best Actor award. “For playing cool, anxious and freaked in a horror comedy?,” I wrote. “SAG members honestly believe that Kaluuya’s performance was craftier and more planted or affecting than The Post‘s Tom Hanks, Stronger‘s Jake Gyllenhaal and Phantom Thread‘s Daniel Day Lewis? C’mon!”

The notion of Kaluuya suddenly becoming a Best Actor Oscar nominee and especially Get Out being positioned as a formidable Best Picture contender “makes me feel like I’m drowning, like I’m drowning in jello,” I wrote in a comment thread. “This is staggering…I’m literally wobbling as I walk around.”

About five hours ago Variety‘s Guy Lodge wrote, “It’s not like you need extra reasons to root for Daniel Kaluuya to get an Oscar nomination, but here’s one: it’ll make Jeff Wells actively convulse.”

Melanie Lynskey: “He said that people who voted for Get Out“ are ‘wrong’ and ‘perverse’…it’s hysterical.”

So I tweeted the following: “Guy & Melanie — who had even flirted with the idea of Kaluuya having given an award-worthy performance? Who even fiddled with it? Nobody had picked up this torch before the Boston Society of Film Critics did last weekend, and now all of a sudden you’re both longtime Kaluuya devotees. Bullshit.”

In response to my “who had even flirted?”, Joseph Finn tweeted “Literally 99% of the people who saw it and have been talking about it since spring.” Last February, he meant.

What Finn meant is that for the last nine or ten months in Coffee Bean and Starbucks cafes all over Los Angeles, people have been saying to each other, “Wow, that good-looking chill guy who perspires and opens his mouth in horror in Get Out when the evil whiteys try to hypnotize and lobotomize him? What a performance!”

My reply to Finn: “If you say so, but for months and months the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby spitballers never once mentioned Kaluuya, even as a boredom killer. So I guess the various chapters of the ‘Daniel Kaluuya deserves an Oscar’ fan clubs met in secret dungeon-like bars and cafes during the wee hours.”