Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

dws1982 wrote:

Greg wrote:"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020 is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück 'for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal'." For those of you who have seen Orange Is The New Black, Gluck's niece is Abigail Savage, who played Gina Murphy.

As soon as I saw the words "American" and "poet", I thought it might be Wendell Berry, but alas, not this year (or any other year, let's be honest).

I will say I usually find the Nobel committee's citations for the Literature award to be absolutely hilarious examples of pretentious incoherence:

If that is what they meant, the citation would have read much better if they wrote "make unique individual existences universal."

"The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2020 was awarded jointly to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson 'for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.'"

I think the J.M.G. Le Clezio citation takes the cake for high-minded drivel: "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization".

I turned this into a Twitter thread, naturally.

Thanks for compiling those citations. They gave me a good laugh.

Greg wrote:"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020 is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück 'for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal'." For those of you who have seen Orange Is The New Black, Gluck's niece is Abigail Savage, who played Gina Murphy.

As soon as I saw the words "American" and "poet", I thought it might be Wendell Berry, but alas, not this year (or any other year, let's be honest).

I will say I usually find the Nobel committee's citations for the Literature award to be absolutely hilarious examples of pretentious incoherence:
Peter Handke "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience"
Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”
Kazuo Ishiguro "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world"
Patrick Modiano "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation"
Thomas Transtromer "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality"
Doris Lessing "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"
Elfriede Jelinek "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power"

I'm just poking fun at him because he seems to think he deserves the prize (probably because Obama got it, so why shouldn't he?).

OscarGuy wrote:I wonder when Trump will attack the Noble Prize Committee for not recognizing his bringing peace to the middle east, ending the trade war with China, getting Kim to denuclearize, and by accepting immigrants with open arms...

That may be harder to do when the winner is an organization, rather than an individual, and being honored for their body of work rather than their achievements of the year. And is heavily funded by the U.S., no less. But who knows.

I wonder when Trump will attack the Noble Prize Committee for not recognizing his bringing peace to the middle east, ending the trade war with China, getting Kim to denuclearize, and by accepting immigrants with open arms...

"The Nobel Peace Prize 2020 is awarded to the World Food Programme (WFP) 'for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contributions to better conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.'"

"The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2020 is awarded to the American poet Louise Glück 'for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal'." For those of you who have seen Orange Is The New Black, Gluck's niece is Abigail Savage, who played Gina Murphy.

This week they are awarding the Nobel Prizes. So far:

"The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice 'for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus'."

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 with one half to Roger Penrose 'for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity' and and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez 'for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy'."

"The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna 'for the development of a method for genome editing'."

Also, there will be no formal in-person ceremony or banquet this year, due to Covid. The laureates will receive their prizes at home and the foundation has invited them to be guests of honor for the next formal ceremony, which they hope is next year. Maybe they could deliver banquet meals with the prizes. Sort of the Nobel Prizes meets Domino's.

http://nobelprize.org