We have never seen bitching like this!
Usually when the cameras are on the Oscars contenders — for the sake of example, let’s say the Best Actress hopefuls — everybody smiles when their names are announced and registers flutters of humility at the huge applause.
Then in the pin-drop silence, they assumes their game face.
This game face is a marvel of disciplined acting — part cat with ears pricked casing a blue jay and part hint of finding it all so unnecessary because, gee whiz, just being nominated is enough.
The envelope is torn, the judgment is rendered, and the losers all go into little celebrations. Oh, how enthusiastically they nod yes and applaud, as if, really, they voted for this very person over themselves. Only the winner gushes tears as she sweeps through a rush of glad-handers and pop-up huggers to have a proper mental breakdown in front of the microphone.
Not so the Brokeback crew. With blunt candor, director and screenwriter are publicly venting their outrage. And the most colorful temper tantrum was hurled this Saturday by the Mother of Brokeback herself, Annie Proulx, the author of the short-story.
In a knock-down-drag-out piece that ran in the U.K. Guardian, Proulx (below) details her night at the Oscars.
“On the sidewalk stood hordes of the righteous, some leaning forward like wind-bent grasses, the better to deliver their imprecations against gays and fags to the open windows of the limos,” it begins — then carries right straight on from there.
The choicest bit of bitchery:
The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before…
We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good.
And rumor has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - - excuse me , Crash – a few weeks before the ballot deadline.
Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.
On a more serene note, she offers her thoughts on the Best Actor award not going to Heath Ledger:
The prize, as expected, went to Philip Seymour Hoffman for his brilliant portrayal of Capote … Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin’ image of a once-living celeb. But which takes more skill? Acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories? Or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page?
I don’t know. The subject never comes up. Cheers to David Strathairn, Joaquin Phoenix and Hoffman, but what about actors who start in the dark?
Fuck ‘em, Annie.
The movie, like your short story, will continue to rise on its own power. It will reach men and women living constricted lives. And they will be changed — as we have been.
I am a gay male and saw both BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN and CRASH. In my opinion, CRASH was the better movie and deserved the Academy Award. All the hype and sour grapes about Brokeback not winning the award just because it is a gay movie is ludicrous. And besides that it is NOT the first gay cowboy movie. Andy Warhol did it first about twenty years or so ago with a movie called LONESOME COWBOYS. Check it out sometime.
I also saw both films but I thought Brokeback was the stronger film, not because of the ‘gay’ aspect, but rather how it was a quiet meditation. Crash was just that — a CRASHing, in-your-face, harsh look at a subject. Brokeback was a whisper from a stranger; I heard the voice for weeks after I saw the film.
What I DON’T understand is how Reese (whom I love) won best actress for the portray of a woman she looked nothing like nor sounded nothing like. I didn’t see any great acting stretch and while she was very good, I don’t think it was a performance for bringing home the prize.
Speaking of Best Actress, Felicity Huffman was superb in Transamerica — funny, quirky and great with the occassional gay-rights political quip. Everyone is talking about Brokeback. But Felicity was the second biggest robbery at that damn Awards show.
Me, and my two gay roommates were STUNNED when Brokeback didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar. The movie was brilliant, beautiful, and progressive….simply wonderful. As a mood piece, it was pure perfection. It stayed with me for weeks after I saw it around Christmastime of last year. Crash was a meditaion on themes we have all seen before….racism, police brutality, the war between the haves and the have nots etc…I agree that Reece should not have won for Walk The Line, but I was pleased about Philip Syemour Hoffman’s win. The good news is that gay themed entertainment is on the upswing, and that is an important sign.
Self governing organizations are internally politically motivated by the prospect of rewards and gains for the self governing internal political organization, such as the Oscar/Academy Awards organization, aren’t they? Brokeback will continue to amass financial gains, best picture or not, for years to come, remembered by many who never saw it, controversy equals cash, boil cauldron boil, right Annie? Crash will now surpass its anticipated financial gains, only being forgotten by most in years to come, which did see it.
In review of Brokeback, recall many a charming gay critic’s perspectives of an inaccurate physical sexual scene portrayal and repeated glances of your watch wishing for the much anticipated, “THE END.” And I don’t mean getting it in the end cowboy picture style! After all Annie, isn’t it an honor just to be nominated?
Thought. Pulitzer Prize Novel, 10 Academy Awards, one awarded to a gifted woman of African Heritage who was banned from the white folk cemetery in 1952, but memorialized in the white folk cemetery 50 years later. Yet she was allowed to be the first person of color to attend as guest, not as servant, at the 1939 Oscar Night Affair, to receive her Statue. Of course I write of Gone with the Wind and Hattie “Mammy” McDaniel(s). Many recall the movie, and Mammy, yet never saw either. Many more forget the controversy over the colored actress who could not lie to rest at the white’s only cemetery in 1952, but rubbed elbows with the white folk at Hollywood’s 1939 social event of the year. More even fail to recall Hattie was the first Oscar black guest and award recipient. Point, pity about your luck Annie, but Brokeback did not receive the Oscar Picture of the Year Award simply because it wasn’t. The Oscar ballot casting folk, as the English say, simply were not amused. Alas, in years to come people will recall Brokeback, but likely for all the wrong reasons. The two most important reasons of which is that recognition by nominations, acceptance indicated by attendance and box office gross speaks louder than the arresting officers of resistive homosexuals in 1969 at a little bar in New York, called Stonewall. And me, I am just a 43 year old poor white trailer trash lifetime openly gay man living in ultra conservative Cincinnati, home of my favorite deceased aunt, Marge Schott, who recalls being laughed at as a “fag” and not in a funny way, just last week. And other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
What everyone seems to forget is that the Oscars are given for Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Movie. It has never been, nor will it ever be, for Best Portrayal of a Gay Man, or Best Portrayal of a Transgender, or Best Gay Themed Movie. There were several movies that were up for awards, and the average viewer let themselves be swallowed up by the media’s furor that this was the Year of the Gay. Did anyone listen to George Clooney’s acceptance speech and his poignant take on what Hollywood means to him? In a nutshell, Brokeback took a very short story and turned it into a sweeping epic, the likes of which homosexuals around the globe state they have never seen before. But as a gay male living in urban Chicago, the dynamics and themes of a movie like Crash have considerable more impact to me than the love story of two gay cowboys. Crash was the better of the two, in mine and the Academy’s opinion. And Ms. Proulx speaks out of both sides of her mouth, when she states that her gay cowboys had to have their characters drawn out of the dark. Understood. But so could be said about each character in Crash, as none were based on any known luminaries. So in that vein, why not give Crash its due, and simply start making better gay themed movies for the future. Maybe even adapt a book that is more than 100 pages long, to understand the characters’ fully, and perhaps even one day empathize with them.
Jeff, what a sweetly reasonable observation–very refreshing amidst so much drama off screen!
Here’s another take on it: (link)
Excerpt:
I suppose I ought to be upset that Brokeback Mountain didn’t win Hollywood’s best picture award, but it’s hard to get too cranky. After all, it’s just an award and the “Academy” has a terrible record when it comes to picking the best.
Besides, let’s be honest: Is there anything more pathetic than a homo whining about the outcome of the Academy Awards, fer chrissakes? Holy stereotypes, Batman, he’s crying because his favorite picture didn’t get all the Oscars!
Nope, don’t want to go there, especially seeing as how this might be the first year in the last 20 that I paid the slightest bit of attention to the Academy Awards. When I lived in Washington, D.C. in the mid-’80s I had a roommate who treated it like some sort of gay Super Bowl. I retaliated by watching the real Super Bowl, even though I didn’t care about that, either.
OK, well, I’m a little embarassed that Annie Proulx wrote that. But she did, so what the hell. I guess she just needed to vent as much as anybody else did. Chins up Annie - you wrote a wonderful story that got made into a great movie and has been and will be seen by a lot of people. The Oscar would have been a nice validation but your story is bigger than an Oscar.
Say what you like, the Acadamy awards never take my attention very much, but I can’t just overlook this, can I? Well, the oscar not reaching BBM is of course a sign of denial from the “Academy” and I agree with Tom that the story is so much more than a gay cowboy movie, or an oscar, or a good movie. I think people shouldn’t make such a fuss of it, it’s a good movie, and if the damned Academy can’t appreciate it, fuck ‘em. Hard.
Annie, I love your story, God bless you for it.
I was in Paris when Matthew Shepard was pistol-whipped to within 120 hours of his death. I was out of the media hoopla of candlelight vigils; Fred Phelp’s encounter with the “Angels of Peace”; Coretta Scott King’s letter of sympathy and belief in the civil rights of GAYS. I missed Dennis Shepards withering denunciation of the church’s holding basin for Pilate plea to withhold the death penalty. But I remember my Mother saying people were angry and going to do something, pass laws and the like. Well of course the storm has passed and after almost 8 years virtually every state has passed, and the Administration is trying to pass laws dealing with the rights of GAYS. So I wasn’t surprised the Academy exercised restraint. IT’S ONLY A MOVIE.JBM