An Oscar Buying Opportunity

A futures contract on "An Inconvenient Truth" winning Best Documentary is currently trading at $0.90 on the dollar at InTrade.  A 10% chance of the Goracle's magnum opus not winning?  If that movie doesn't win, it means whichever accounting firm was auditing the voting made a major clerical error.  Shy of that, this has to be the biggest lock in Oscar history.

Of course the actual nominee is the film's director Davis Guggenheim, not the Gorebot himself, but that won't prevent what's bound to be a nearly unending standing ovation when the film wins.  Some pre-show buzz suggests Gore may go so far as to declare his Presidential candidacy if "he" wins.  Me, I think he'll hold off to see how the Nobel thing shakes out before reluctantly bowing to the pressure of his teeming fans and joining that fray, but his speech tonight ought to be one for the ages, nonetheless.

Steel yourselves for a heavy-handed, self-congratulatory, faux-impassioned lecture, during which the guy who cues the get-off-the-stage music will hold off longer than for any other limelight hog of the evening.

Elsewhere:  Hot Air is hosting a discussion thread and video repository throughout the evening.

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Update:  Well, "he" won (obviously).  But the acceptance speech was remarkably succinct (just about 60 seconds, which seemed to be the typical musical cut-off time for honorees who ran long).  Of course by the time Gore took the stage, the audience had already been treated earlier in the telecast to a performance by Melissa Ethridge of the film's nominated song "I Need to Wake Up", punctuated with a text-based eco-lecture projected on the stage-wide screen behind her.  This was followed immediately by Gore appearing on-stage with no less superlatively hip a superstar than Leo himself, who vomited so much hero worship and bootlickery at the Goracle, I wondered if he was about to get one of Al's patented on-stage cybersmooches.

So by the time Gore took the stage for the second time to bask in victory, he and his cause had already gotten 5 or 6 minutes worth of airtime.  What's a 30-second spot going for this year?  If he were to have declared candidacy tonight, might he have had to book in-kind contributions for the tens of millions of dollars worth of free advertising?

However ripened his intent to run may or may not be, I think he'd be foolish to announce now, despite this being a nice time to poach a few Hollywood politicos from Hillary and Obama.  Better to let them beat each other up for another 6 months and then waltz in clean.