What a relief—that huge marathon of tosh called Avatar won only three Oscars last night in Los Angeles, and all in the appropriate technical categories. Director Kathryn Bigelow's 'small' Iraq war film The Hurt Locker (that means small in budget, small in box office) walked off with six, including that for Best Picture. It was good too to see Sandra Bullock—one of Hollywood's most under-rated stars—win Best Actress, and especially for a film, The Blind Side, which has unsettled solidly liberal tinseltown by its celebration of Palin-style downhome values. 

In The Times today, Daniel Finkelstein comments on the ever-widening gulf between the voters and the elected. Taking the 'bullying Brown' story as his starting point, and the fact that it seems to have made no difference to anything, he writes that,

'the story slipped into the huge gulf of distrust, disbelief and lack of interest that now separates the political class from everyone else.