. . . but Michael Sullivan has beat me to it with every word.

That's all I ask. Two weeks in a place where women are not questioned, and men are punished for disobedience. I am, as the young people say, so _there_.

I'm saying it. But admit it--you're thinking it.

I find it genuinely hard to believe that this tremendous "revelation" has just been stumbled upon. Surely anyone with even a passing knowledge of patterns of domestic abuse knows that leaving entails at least as much risk as staying, and sometimes (sadly) more.

If this book sobers up some administrations and law-enforcement agencies (to say nothing of ordinary individuals) about the reality of the kind of support and protection women require when they leave abusive situations, then I'm all for it. I must say, however, that I am skeptical that this will be the case. When even the experts themselves treat this information as news, my hopes cannot be high.

Re. your sentiments that this situation is criminal: Say it, sister.

"'We have to stop thinking of women only in terms of their reproductive potential. The daughter could live a full and happy life without having children of her own.' While reproductive technology seems to offer women a miraculous range of options, I wonder if we are not also imbibing a subtler, far less liberating message. That anything less than motherhood is tragedy."

There's nothing subtle about this message. I can hardly imagine anyone with even a reasonable degree of awareness being oblivious to the fact--the dark, scary, depressing fact--that women are, perhaps more than ever, being told that reproduction is the essence of their identity as sexed / gendered beings. Combine this with the commodification of children--you've got the degree, the house, the car, now buy the Matching Kid (other parent not included / required)!--and you've got a weighty addition to the growing burden of social pressure placed on western women to a) _want_ stuff, and b) make that "stuff" another human being.

I'm pretty sure I hear several early feminists rolling with anguish in their graves.

. . . that however worthy her sentiments (and they are worthy), her determination is stronger than her poetry.

'Fraid we Canadians may have beaten you to it on the issue of sugar, kids. Michel Régnier, an immigrant from France, made the award-winning _Black Sugar_ (_Sucre noir_) twenty years ago. See http://www.nfb.ca/portraits/michel_regnier/en/ for a profile of this filmmaker.

First, a small, pedantic point (since I am, myself, a small pedant): Perhaps Scotswoman Tilda Swinton would consider herself "British" (I have no idea, never having heard her express an opinion on the matter), but Daniel Day Lewis, notwithstanding his dual citizenship, has made it pretty clear over the years that his primary cultural identification is Irish. Something to note, perhaps. (And, yes, I'm Irish, if one wants to make an issue of it.) The point, I realise, is that neither he nor any of his colleagues in this rarified group is American.

This was an interesting jumping-off point for this impassioned, if rather conflicted, article. Last night's spectacle was, really, not materially different from those of many writers'-strike-free years; the montages were, I thought, rather enjoyable, and clearly the binocular-and-periscope bit, as well as the awaking-from-a-bad-dream sequence, were both done with a good deal of self-deprecation. And, personally, I actually kind of _liked_ seeing the retrospective on winning films and directors from the Academy's past, if only to be reminded that the fact that the likes of _Braveheart_ and _Gladiator_ once won Best Picture has not, in fact, precipitated the end of the world. Yet.

No, I'm not really convinced that any of that really got up Ms. Wilson's nose. Her dead-on comments about _Michael Clayton_--oh, how many of us wish more "Hollywood" films could whisper and simmer like this one!--are both wonderful and appropriate here, linking the notion of film with the notion of what film can do, beyond borders, beyond time, when it really, really gets quiet and listens and then tries like hell. But the larger rant about America's place in the world and the pass to which it has come bespeak something much, much bigger. I have complete sympathy for it, and indeed, it made my (non-American) heart ache for the author. But it also made me wonder about the extent to which film--I mean, you know, movies, things that turn up eventually on TV, things made in the thousands every year, the vast majority even of good ones largely forgotten--is still a crucible for American conscience and morality and ethics and love and untold numbers of issues for which, really, it is ill-suited in the incarnation it must invariably assume at something like the Oscars.

Ms. Wilson's bitter anger, disappointment, even disgust here . . . well, to cut this thing short(er), I'd love to see her take this out of a review of an awards show and put it into a longer, weightier article about the intersection of these issues. Because, frankly, the wee golden shoulders of a naked, faceless man are just not broad enough. Give us Atlas, Cintra. I think it's high time someone did.

For the love of [insert deity or name of spiritual leader or movement here], please, please don't ever do this sort of thing again. I live in Canada and thought this was simply too bizarre to be real (did you mean to type, like, "Kentucky", maybe, I wondered?), and it would seem that it pretty much is. I love Broadsheet, even when I don't agree with the attitudes or opinions expressed in it, and expect the contributors thereto to subject their work to the same sort of fact-checking I assume they would impose on any other journalistic work they do.

Americans have a poor enough understanding of Canada's . . . oh, hell, Canada's anything--health care, politics, weather, social mores, beer. Please don't make the problem even one iota worse.