Adventures in Words

                 Chloé Zhao accepts the best director Oscar for “Nomadland”   CNN photo Something unusual happened to me this year in the run-up to the Academy Awards. I lost interest. Always before, ever since I was a kid jumping up and down on the couch in anticipation of Hollywood's big night, the excitement was palpable. That in itself was strange since even as a kid, something inside me knew it was all make-believe. Once I grew up and followed a career where reviewing movies was part of the job description, the make-believe part didn't go away … I just had to take it seriously. Very seriously. Especially at Oscar time. This year that didn't happen. It was partly an accident of timing. I had seen most of the contenders last fall and over the holidays, getting special access to screeners and links because of my membership in the Hawaii Film Critics Society. By the time I launched this blog to talk about them several months later, they weren't nearly as vivid in my me

PBS image Is greatness overrated? This possibility occurred to me recently after watching Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's three-part biography of Ernest Hemingway on PBS.  Hemingway was the touchstone, the Jeopardy answer to the question of why some men of a certain age might, when they were younger men, have entertained the crazy notion that writing could be a pretty good profession to go into. Actually, the coolest profession ever. There was just one catch. You had to be able to write. But when you're a younger man, you often don't know what you don't know. Overestimating yourself is something younger men do. Especially those wanting to be writers. Ernest Hemingway was a writer like no other. The talking heads on the documentary – including writers Tobias Wolff, Edna O'Brien and my favorite, Abraham Verghese, along with literary scholars and biographers, take turns telling why. He was a game changer.  Like Shakespeare, the English language wasn't the same aft