“Is it really time to talk about missteps?” Sasha Stone has written in response to a David Poland “Hot Button” piece that summarizes ’06 as “the Year that The Blog Rose” but which lightly admonishes N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr.

“Maybe it’s time to talk about those sage words of wisdom by our patron saint William Goldman: ‘Nobody knows anything,'” Stone retorts. “Not the mainsteam media, not the critics, and most definitely not the blogger who proclaimed six months out that DREAMGIRLS WILL WIN BEST PICTURE, and [who] shot down anyone who suggested other possible scenarios, at once digging an impossibly deep hype hole for the movie to have to struggle out of.

“Poland scoldsCarr, but one of the most obvious differences between the former and the latter is that when Carr gets something wrong, he admits it with glorious self-deprecating prose. When Poland gets something wrong, he assumes a rewritten history and slithers on. To paint Carr and all of mainstream media with a sullied brush, and then put him into that picture so far above the fray, is a very Poland-esque diversion. Sometimes this blogger wonders if he actually believes the stuff he writes, or if he doesn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t have a touch of the old P.T. Barnum.”