Okay, well, one fact.  First and foremost, I love the girls and guys at USA Today.  The "McPaper" jab in the headline here is more in friendly jest, believe me.  But with that out of the way, two items in Gary Strauss' Oscar reactions piece bother me:

The pundits quoted are David Poland (ubiquitous as always), Scott Feinberg and Andy Scott.

First, Scott indicates that Laura Linney "was completely off the radar" for her performance in Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages."  This is hardly the case, and is kind of indicative of how beneficial it can be to actually be in the pipeline out here.  Linney worked this film hand-in-hand with Jenkins for months...hard.  If someone was going to miss, it was going to be Linney who took the spot.  This wasn't some out-of-nowhere nomination like Tommy Lee Jones' "In the Valley of Elah" performance, which had clearly run out of steam months before the season got into full swing.  But this entire point is subjective in some ways, so it gets a pass.  Maybe I'm just being feisty.

Second, sticking with the lead actress category, Feinberg is quoted as saying "We knew Angelina was a fringe contender, and Keira wasn't nominated last year for a bigger role in Pride & Prejudice."  Well he's half right (though arguably so) and half wrong.  Obviously, Ms. Knightley did in fact receive a nomination for Joe Wright's "Pride & Prejudice," which released in 2005, not "last year."

I understand Strauss was under a deadline here, but fact-checking is fact checking, no?  I was supposed to call him up and participate, but I was so clogged with the day's twisted events that I never got around to returning.  Sorry to see some of these folks send up some bogus info for publication under his byline, but that's the way it goes sometimes, I guess.