Good news - the Academy has nominated the South African sci-fi instant classic District 9 as well as Avatar for this year's Oscars - first time in decades that ten films will vie for the statue. The big news is the ex-husband and wife head to head, as Avatar and The Hurt Locker both lead in nominations. I predict that the 3-D blockbuster will win, for the obvious reasons. Jeremy Renner is superb as the wild man bomb disposal expert, but will likely not prevail over sentimental favourite Jeff Bridges. Absent is much mention if any of The Road, or for that matter Brothers. Tarantino's film has done surprisingly well, and hopefully will win best supporting actor.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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