Al Gore supporters are hoping he didn't plow through too much celebratory cake after learning about his Oscar nomination for An Inconvenient Truth. Some have even floated the theory that if the once-kinda-sorta president shows up on the red carpet at the Kodak theatre looking large and in charge, he'll sit out '08: If he's thin, he's in.

The "Fat Gore" theory appears to have first cropped up in November on Mick LaSalle's Maximum Strength Mick blog on SFGate.com: "When Al Gore started to run for the presidency in 2000, he was thin. By the time the race was over, he had gained a lot of weight (like Clinton in 1992), and then he kept on gaining weight in the months after the election ... If you see a chubby, happy Al Gore standing next to the producer and director, celebrating the win at the Oscars, forget it, he's not running."

LaSalle then went on to posit another theory: The "No-Show." "The cultural resentment of Hollywood is almost pathological in certain sections of the country. However, if Gore chooses not to be [at the Oscars]—if he's at the spa that day—then you can take it to the bank. Big Al's running."

Over at his New Republic blog, The Spine, Gore's friend and onetime Harvard lecturer Marty Peretz wrote about some of Gore's recent appearances and wondered if the former vice president would run for president and gushed, "he sure could." This prompted a comment from a reader that, "if he is fat at the Oscars he isn't running, but if he has lost a few pounds he is ... Maybe Oprah can weigh him on her show. I hear she's moving it to the West Wing."