Now I am become Cate Blanchett, Destroyer of Worlds

Cate Blanchett sums up the importance of the arts:

Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it.

Change reality. Right. Glad we've got that out of the way. It gets better:

But there is more. We do more than all that. We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.

Change governments? History? Gravity? Reality itself? And all that at the risk of her own life? What does Miss Blanchett do in her spare time?

Frankly, I think she's overreaching herself here. In all my years as an actor and writer my performances, plays, and stories have only resulted in a cabinet reshuffle in the Balkans, the shortening of the Franco-Prussian War by four days, a 0.002 percent increase in the gravitational pull of Sirius, and a slight reorganisation of the space-time continuum resulting in a minor alteration of the strong nuclear force. As to risk, I don't know about my life, but my ulcer has been acting up over the past week.

Maybe Oscars are some sort of force multiplier. But then, Miss Blanchett isn't one of those "unimportant" people eking out their "brief, limited, unimportant lives."

Lord love a duck.