Artforum.com...

<font color="#b70606">“Most men agree that a true friend is a precious treasure,” Socrates’ student and amanuensis Xenophon records the philosopher observing, “and nevertheless there is nothing about which we give ourselves so little trouble as to make men our friends.” Such tensions—between the utter centrality of friendship to the development of both the individual and society at large and the casual, almost thoughtless way in which so many friendships are made and lost—have animated philosophical discourse since the very beginnings of the western intellectual tradition. The elusive, nuanced nature of <em>philia</em> and its relationship to community (both earthly and otherwise) remained an essential theme for theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas and secular thinkers like Montaigne and Mill, and such questions continue to tantalize contemporary thinkers and politicians today. Angie Hobbs—Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England—has written widely on the philosophical history of friendship. She spoke with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi by phone in December 2009.
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At this past Sunday’s Academy Awards, independent cinema trumped traditional studio fare, with independent films winning 12 Oscars (excluding the short film categories), compared to the nine Oscars won by the major studios. The big winner of the night was Kathryn Bigelow’s independent production The Hurt Locker (produced by Voltage Pictures and distributed by Summit Entertainment), which won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. With The Hurt Locker’s win, the number of independent films to win the Best Picture Oscar in the last 30 years comes to 18....

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