Cate Blanchett And Newborn Son Steal Limelight At Thinkers Summit

Hollywood star wattage outweighed intellectual light at the opening of an Australian thinkers summit on Saturday, with cameras firmly focused on Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett and her newborn son.

Fellow actor and X-Men film franchise star Hugh Jackman also stole the limelight from the other 998 of the nation's best minds, promising to lobby for more Australian actors to come home as his "big idea" for the future planning summit.

"It's a beginning, I believe really strongly, of a long and meaningful relationship between artists and the government, not as an adjunct to, but as a fundamental aspect of, society," a beaming Blanchett said when collared by media...

Blanchett happily posed for photos after entering the so-called 2020 Summit of Australia's brightest minds in the Great Hall of parliament in Canberra on Saturday, just six days after giving birth to her third son, Ignatius Martin Upton.

Blanchett, one of two females among the 10 summit chairs, sat in the front row next to her playwright husband Andrew Upton, who was left holding the baby, who promptly fell asleep after having a wrap removed by his mother.

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Comments

[adzeman]

Using the words thinker and actor in the same sentence is asking for trouble. The photo of Jackman and Blanchett is nice though.

[Jaylee07]

I love Cate Blanchett and it is refreshing to see artists' with some brains.

[GPaX]

"The Australia 2020 Summit was designed to harness the best ideas from across the nation and apply them to the challenges before us, to create a better future for Australia."

http://www.australia2020.gov.au/report/index.cfm

Cate being there does not subtract from the value of the effort, and whomever wrote this piece for Yahoo is... a yahoo....

Getting the people to engage with and work with government should be applauded, not denigrated......

[AnnArky]

A "thinkers' summit?" Who threw this joke-fest together?

[stringer]

Hey if this is how they want to do it in Austraila that's their business. Frankly I wouldn't mind having George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Mia Farrow sit in on a few of our government's cabinet meetings if to do nothing more than remind them there are places called New Orleans and Darfur, and that genocide is still happening.

[kellygrrrl]

excellent point stringer!
I agree!
Angelina Jolie has done more to promote humanitarian efforts than any Bush appointee

[ang4ever]

AJ is # 39 on the list of great thinker. Imagine that.

[Gilda]

Awesome name for a baby.

[sarchasm]

Initials. .. I am you ..

[Titonwan]

I love Ms. Blanchett. She was in probably the best "anti-western" ever. "The Missing" with Tommy Lee Jones is an awesome movie, but little seen, uncut.

[plutorage]

I never cared much for Blanchett until I saw her in a Wes Anderson comedy very recently (The Life Aquatic) and she had a great comic touch. I wish she would do more comedy. She should go on SNL as guest host.

[dawlishgal]

She was wonderful in Elizabeth!

[stephley]

So artists can't be thinkers? Or is it just actors who can't think? Is that all actors, or just those generally considered attractive? Hitchens is a journalist and as near as I can tell, seems more of a trend-spotter or bomb-tosser than an intellectual.
And it was an Australian summit, for Australian thinkers.

[ailbhe]

She is not there for her thinking abilities but to provide publicity for them. So it is not a thinking summit but a propaganda campaign. A serious summit would have people like Chomsky, Dawkins and Hitchens but that would not get the attention of a non thinking, non reading audience.

I don't take seriously any organisation that needs celebrities to pose for them. They are trying to sell themselves to the type of people who read the National Enquirer.

[RickTheScribe]

Why would you assume that because Cate Blanchett is an actor that she is not capable of having a high intellect? Don't be such an elitist. The fact is that she majored in economics and art history at Melbourne University and from what I understand she has a passion for classical Russian literature. So she's probably not a drooling idiot. I should also point out that Chomsky is American, while the faux intellectuals, Hitchens and Dawkins, are both British. So why, exactly, would they be included in a summit of Australia's finest thinkers? Your logic here completely escapes me.

[aristippe]

dawkins and hitchens are jokes, intellectual lightweights. Sorry to bust-up your book shelf.

[caesarf]

Are Chomsky, Dawkins and Hitchens Australians?

[brainlego]

no

[mediamarv]

My, my aren't we precious.

I notice you weren't there.... say much about your brain power and thinking abilities???

[beright]

I agree. Where was Chomsky and the rest of the MIT scholars? This was bogus, period.

[HarrietandBlahBlahNyborg]

Yeah, but do you understand that this conference was in Australia for Australians? There are plenty of Australian university professors, writers and so on present. It's just that she and Jackman were invited to speak on the future of the Arts in Australia. Again, the emphasis being on the word AUSTRALIAN, so the Chomskys and MIT scholars of the world weren't invited because they aren't -- wait for it -- Australian.