Variety isn't the first publication to parallel America's bright new political era with this year's Oscar derby. But, bless their hearts, they may very well be the last.

Not that "Obama message echoes at Oscar time," a think-piece published this morning, offers the cramp-inducing logical stretch of EW's trailblazing "How Obama Helps Batman" from last November. But it does exhaustively unpack pretty much every other zeitgeist-y scenario you probably hadn't thought of, from the president's message of hope not-so-coincidentally resonating throughout Milk, or the angst of the post-Bush era rewarding the totemic power critique that is Frost/Nixon.

The hell with the also-rans, though. To paraphrase a common query accompanying so many contemporary world affairs: Is it good for the Slumdog? Well, sort of; that film's front-runner status evidently owes more to Rocky's feel-good example 32 years ago than to anything Obama has done since his election. Which, of course, only reaffirms the likelihood that three decades from now, we'll all wonder what the Academy was thinking when it could have rewarded something actually, like, good.

Like any of it matters anyway — everybody knows that Jon Stewart sets the Oscar agenda these days.