The Oscar for Best Actress tomorrow night should go to Ms. C. Mulligan, pictured, whose meteoric breakthrough in An Education, is nothing less than revelatory. Mulligan has a jejeune star quality that sparkles like Audrey Tatou, or Audrey Hepburn. She's arguably the most exciting new English actress since Julie Christie, and she brings a genuinely fresh air to the screen. Baby-faced, pleasingly slim, and able to be sultry or pouty, wise or silly, at will, her performance in this fine, troubling and very sad, moving film (which constantly asks the viewer to question what love, what desire, and what ambition are worth) is striking. She becomes the Sixties ingenue par excellence. Ms. Mulligan makes the film a classic. She deserves the statue. Meanwhile, she is to appear, this year, in three of the most-anticipated films: Brighton Rock (with Sam Riley), a Kaz Ishiguro adaptation (with Keira Knightley), and Wall Street's sequel.
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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