Critical reception of Brokeback Mountain

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The film Brokeback Mountain received many awards, including three Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score as well as four Golden Globe awards for Best Motion Picture-Drama, Best Director, Best Song, and Best Screenplay and four BAFTA Awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Jake Gyllenhaal). The film also received four Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Ensemble, more than any other movie released in 2005.

Contents

[edit] Awards

[edit] Nominations

[edit] Post-Academy Awards reaction

Some critics accused the Academy of homophobia for failing to award the Oscar for Best Picture to Brokeback Mountain and instead giving it to a rival nominee, Crash:

  • Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who’ve led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed “Brokeback Mountain.”' [8]
  • Nikki Finke, Los Angeles Weekly: I knew there was a chance that, even without seeing the movie, Oscar voters could feel guilt-tripped or succumb to a herd mentality to vote for the “gay-cowboy” movie and strike a blow against Republican wedge politics and extremist religious hatemongering. But they didn’t, and Brokeback lost for all the Right’s reasons. [9]
  • Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Sunday's selection of Crash over Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture was the first time in memory that fear seemed to be the guiding impulse for awarding Oscar's top prize. Faced with the choice between a feel-good movie about the evils of racism and a troublesome film that challenged prejudices about homosexual love, Academy voters grabbed their security blankets and starting sucking on their thumbs. [10]

Author E. Annie Proulx has also blamed right-wing influences for the film's failure to win Best Picture:

"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. 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 rumour 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."

The writer has also pondered whether Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance, though "brilliant," involved the easier acting skill of "mimicry" (by implication, unlike Heath Ledger's Oscar-nominated Brokeback Mountain performance, in which he invented the clenched-jaw & mannerisms of "Ennis Del Mar"). [11]

Supporting the charge of homophobia were media reports that some members of the Academy were so opposed to the subject matter of the film that they refused to even view Brokeback Mountain before voting.[1]

By contrast, Roger Ebert defended the selection of Crash as Best Picture in a post-Oscar editorial:

"It is noticeable how many writers on 'Hollywood's homophobia' were able to sidestep Capote, which was a hard subject to miss, being right there on the same list of best picture nominees. Were supporters of Brokeback homophobic in championing the cowboys over what Oscarcast host Jon Stewart called the 'effete New York intellectual'? Of course not. Brokeback Mountain was simply a better movie than Capote. And Crash was better than Brokeback Mountain, although they were both among the best films of the year. That is a matter of opinion. But I was not 'discomfited' by Brokeback Mountain. ... I chose Crash as the best film of the year not because it promoted one agenda and not another, but because it was a better film.[12]"

The Ultimate Brokeback Forum [13], a web forum of several thousand members, self-financed and designed a grass roots, full page ad in the May 10, 2006 issue of Daily Variety, thanking the creators of Brokeback Mountain, listing all of the significant Best Picture Awards the film received. While not mentioning the Oscars by name, the absence of the Motion Picture Academy is glaring, particularly as the British Academy is included. This particular issue of Daily Variety was covered by such news organizations as The New York Times, Newsweek, and the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Pond, Steve. AMPAS policy: If you skipped "Brokeback," you shouldn't have voted. Retrieved on 2005-05-11.
v • d • e
Brokeback Mountain
Short story · Soundtrack · Critical reception · Annie Proulx · Focus Features
Crew: Ang Lee (director) · Diana Ossana (producer) · James Schamus (producer) · Larry McMurtry (screenwriter)
Cast: Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar · Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist
Anne Hathaway as Lureen Newsome Twist · Michelle Williams as Alma
Linda Cardellini as Cassie Cartwright · Randy Quaid as Joe Aguirre
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