Anticipatory schadenfreude!

Over at Slate's Movie Club, Dana Stevens gets off the best shot by far in all of the year-end retrospectives. This is delicious.

I'll...confess that the fact Kathryn Bigelow, Cameron's ex-wife and the director of The Hurt Locker, has a good shot at beating him for both the best director and best picture Oscars this year gives me a sense of anticipatory schadenfreude like you would not believe. For all I know, James and Kathryn speak on the phone every day and wish each other's movies nothing but good fortune, but anyone who's ever watched as a smug ex goes on to enormous success has to place him- or herself squarely in Bigelow's camp. It's almost a good-vs.-evil thing. (Not to mention that Hurt Locker is by far the better movie, but these are the Oscars we're talking about. Score-settling is at least as valid a criterion as quality.)