Well, the Oscars have come and gone and we tend only to remember the anomalies. Julie Andrews winning the Oscar for Mary Poppins where Audrey Hepburn had been cast in her stead in My Fair Lady. Citizen Kane losing out to How Green Was My Valley. Richard Burton failing to get an Oscar, as Elizabeth Taylor did, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Marlon Brando sending the native American woman to accept his Godfather Oscar. Just at the moment there’s a huge fuss about Jessie Buckley and Hamnet. Well, you can’t know the quality of a film it derives from but the book of Hamnet is sentimental, middlebrow and ahistorical. Anyone who has read James Joyce’s Ulysses knows that Stephen Dedalus does an extraordinary tour de force account of the significance of names in Shakespeare’s biography. This is Stephen’s brilliant bit of performative skulduggery. The conclusion is something like: ‘through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the living son looks forth’. It’s all scholastic wordplay in the interests of showing off but it’s also a demonstration of how easy it is to dazzle a talkative highbrow audience with a few names.

None of which is anything against Jessie Buckley who is a wonderful actress. We first encountered her a decade or so ago as the runner-up in one of those Andrew Lloyd Webber competitions where a panel decide who will have the God-given right to be a West End star. And the role Jessie Buckley and her fellow contestants were competing for is Nancy in Oliver!. Buckley was stunningly good in the opinion of the panel which back in those days could include Barry Humphries. It’s a terrific format and someone should revive it.

Another possible Oscar winner is Australian Rose Byrne for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Well, we sometimes forget what a versatile and virtuoso figure she is. Think of the sense of drama she brought to Damages with Glenn Close all those years ago and then the wild comedy of Physical. She once said,’I want to do all the classics’ and this was round the time she played Euripides’ Medea at the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the direction of that tinkerer with masterpieces Simon Stone. Stone just at the moment is treating the Adelaide Festival to a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in Korean. Rose Byrne did Medea with her husband Bobby Cannavale and they have a long-term commitment to do Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge with the Sydney Theatre Company which seems to be forever delayed.

A lot of her Australian admirers would love to see her in one of the world’s great plays. She played Briseis in Troy and (perhaps relatedly) she plays a young beauty to the ageing Casanova who is played by Peter O’Toole no less (his previous incarnation is in the form of David Tennant). O’Toole never won an Oscar but so what when his debut in a major film was Lawrence of Arabia, one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema.

Katharine Hepburn was always scathing and trenchant in her disdain for Hollywood vulgarity. When the Academy gave the 1964 Oscar for the best actor to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field rather than to Albert Finney for the title role in Tony Richardson’s film of Tom Jones (with Edith Evans and Hugh Griffith with Micheál Mac Liammóir narrating) she thought the decision puerile.

Hepburn always adhered to the glory of the drama even though that resulted in The Lion in Winter with O’Toole and made it a treasured vehicle for actors even if the script is a bit like Virginia Woolf with medieval wardrobe and lots of rhetoric. But Hepburn was someone who would film Euripides’ Trojan Women (directed by Michael Cacoyannis) with a supporting cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave as Andromache, Geneviève Bujold as Cassandra and Irene Papas as Helen.

This was continuous with the way she could tour Australia in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure under the banner of that great actor/dancer Robert Helpmann whose cinematic legacy is Red Shoes by Powell and Pressburger.

It would be wonderful if Rose Byrne found her way clear to do the great female roles in the dramatic canon. Think of what she might make of Cleopatra. ‘My salad days, When I was green in judgment: cold in blood, To say as I said then!’ Could she partner Chris Hemsworth as her Antony? It’s been noticeable with the Marvel series, in particular, with Thor, that this leading man has been taught – presumably by Ken Branagh – to speak with a standard English accent (it’s there in Rush where he plays the racing driver James Hunt).

Katharine Hepburn was fascinated by the figure of Daisy Bates and her work with indigenous people. It’s interesting to see that Flora, currently at Melbourne’s Regent, represents a potent collaboration on the part of David Halberg’s Australian Ballet with Bangarra Dance Theatre. You don’t have to have an especial affinity with ballet to realise that this is a world-class company which we’re lucky to have. It’s a long time since Helpmann danced the Don in Nureyev’s Don Quixote with the great Russian dancer burning up the stage but the ballet has always been a company that could show an audience what Baryshnikov, say, could do with Spartacus.

It’s good to hear that Adelaide has survived everything. There are rapturous reactions to Monteverdi’s Vespers performed at St Peter’s Cathedral by Pygmalion (it’s on YouTube). But my friend in Adelaide was sorry to be missing Isabelle Huppert in Mary Said What She Said, the show constructed with Robert Wilson. Huppert is a great actress who can subordinate herself to the vision of a great experimental director.  Many years ago in London she did the opposite in a production of Schiller’s neo-Shakespearean play with Anna Massey. We treasure the memory of what Greta Scacchi did at The Ensemble in 2008 as the old virgin queen in the Schiller.

Katharine Hepburn was a Yankee who was in love with that old Irish Catholic Spencer Tracy and would not even reply if someone like Clive James dared to ask her about him. She was among other things a terrific comedian – it’s there in, The Philadelphia Story and it’s there in her stories of making The African Queen. Bogart and John Huston were fine because they drank nothing but whisky: she almost died because she drank river water.