The Oscars feels increasingly like a waste of moral time, even for a pop culture fiend like Eyewear. What with the Ukraine-Russia standoff, Syrian refugees suffering, and even the rise of UKIP, let alone ecological crisis and capitalist misfiring, not to mention the Nazi-style regime in North Korea, the lie that Hollywood saves the world is now a bit stale. Still, a good film is a work of art, as well as entertainment, and even entertainment is welcome now and then in tough times; and a great film can be both great art and a serious moral act. It is for this reason that Eyewear hopes that 12 Years A Slave wins for best film, director, actor and supporting actress. It probably won't, though it is the finest moral Hollywood film since Schindler's List, and perhaps in some ways the greatest film ever made (despite Brad Pitt's hirsute performance as a too-modern Quaker), if only for how it combines art and a vision of a crime almost too vast to fathom without breaking. Instead Gravity and American Hustle seem to have a lock on some prizes, for technical or patriotic or small-minded reasons too dull to explore in detail.
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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