The only thing about this movie that sounded potentially interesting to me was seeing a female director's take on Carrie and her mother. It sounds like that doesn't amount to much.

There's no way of knowing how many would have bought the album, true, but c'mon: the cratering of album sales since the 1990s, which suspiciously coincides with the rise of downloading, is clear evidence.

Couldn't that allegation be made about virtually any artistic work with as much credibility? Artists generally hope to make a living, after all.

Well, actually, illegal downloading has in fact cost the studios money — and it's come very close to gutting the music industry. There's a big difference between a different revenue stream and just allowing people to get all your stuff for free.

My favourite film of the year 2000.

I don't agree there. The first part is certainly better than the second part (though the second part has the absolutely dead-on portrayal of Jean Chretien, ironically by an actor who later ran for office as a separatist), but I thought it was a quite effective portrait of Trudeau.

In Canada I would say he's most identifiable for playing Pierre Trudeau in an extremely popular CBC biographical miniseries about a decade ago.

Moonrise Kingdom was my favourite film of 2012. I dare to hope this will at least approach that level of quality.

Which is, right there, an excellent argument for why literary prizes work best when they focus on one language (lifetime achievement prizes, like the Nobel of the Man Booker International, are the exception, as it's much easier to assess the career of a writer without having to read all their books in a given…

Most books published in America are published in English, and English is the language of America's mainstream culture. Obviously it's going to go to English-language authors. And I imagine that Joseph Pulitzer didn't stipulate a language only because he didn't think he had to.

Most of the world isn't New York, so it's valuable for the rest of us.

I remember him mainly for "The First Duty", the Star Trek: TNG episode where he plays the father of a cadet killed in a training accident.

I know about the new name, I just think that name is really dumb, so I don't use it.

The counterpoint would be that the award allows for great books to be singled out in a way that helps them be remembered. Not all quality books (or other media) automatically join the consciousness, but that's not a strike against their merit. Reading the list of Nobel Laureates (I'm 63 out of 110 at this point) has…

No, it's a subject matter. All awards have them. That's like calling the Orange Prize "biased" towards women. It implies a hidden criterion.

The Booker, at least, is explicitly a prize for English-language fiction, so I don't see how that can be called "biased". American fiction is primarily English-language. I'm Canadian, so the major literary prizes here are explicitly divided into French and English categories.

The board oversees all the prizes and manages the foundation. Generally it accepts the decisions of the committees it appoints for the individual prizes; occasionally it disagrees. Nothing wrong with that, in principle; plenty of bodies operate like that. It is true that disagreements between the board and the…

Alice Munro won the Governor General's Award for Fiction for the first time in 1968, and continued to accumulate honours, foreign and domestic, from the 1970s onward, so I'm not sure why the supposed publishing climate of the 1990s has anything to do with her being famous. She was already quite famous by then.

Anybody who is signing up to be a nun in this day and age would be pretty exceptional in terms of interest in the cause (unlike in the past, where for a lot of people it was just a career option). It's not a "vow", it's a cornerstone of a belief system.

I'd like to imagine that the show would avoid the extremely tired "torn between vows and romantic urges" plot that virtually all protagonist members of the clergy get saddled with (particularly because the vows are seldom given real weight by the narrative).