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Oscar snub of Brokeback shameful
 Gregory
King
What do the Oscars tell us about life? Nothing, of course. “Winning
the Academy Award,” as Paddy Chayefsky once famously told
Vanessa Redgrave, “is not a pivotal moment in history.”
Yet, there is no denying that the Oscars generate a great deal of
interest, catching the attention of tens of millions of Americans,
including many gay Americans, if only for a few hours. The results
are studied by film buffs and trivia lovers for years to come, and
become a part of the Zeitgeist.
While unimportant in the great scheme of things, the Oscars are
a national institution. They highlight trends in the culture, serve
as a milepost in mainstream American film, and provide a glimpse
of what the top professionals in one of our countries’ most
significant industries perceive as the best they and their colleagues
have produced in the prior year. As a result, the Oscars serve as
a seal of approval for many infrequent film-goers, who are more
likely to watch a film on DVD or video, or will watch it when it
later on television, if the film has earned the Academy Award.
The Oscar reflects and bolsters Hollywood’s bottom-line: an
Oscar win in a major category can produce millions of additional
dollars for a film, and the best picture Oscar can generate tens
of millions in additional revenue — Million Dollar Baby took
in an additional $35 million after taking home the Oscar last year
— while also serving as a green-light for films with similar
themes in the future. For example, the best picture Oscar for Dancing
With Wolves revitalized the Western genre, while the award for Chicago
did the same for musicals.
It is for that reason that Sunday night’s Oscars have some
importance to the gay community. The Academy’s decision to
award the Best Picture Oscar to Crash rather than Brokeback Mountain
says that we have a way to go before films with gay characters at
their core will receive Hollywood’s highest honor. How far,
it is difficult to say. The defeat of Brokeback Mountain was a serious
blow, one that suggests that Hollywood feels unable to endorse a
gay love story with its highest honor, even if it means overturning
years of Oscar precedent to do so. Make no mistake, the motion picture
academy used a tire iron on Brokeback Mountain Sunday night, a fact
that seems to be lost on a few leaders in the gay community, including
Neil G. Giuliano, the clueless head of GLAAD, who sent out an e-mail
on Monday morning highlighting Brokeback and Capote’s four
wins and stating that “our community has cause to celebrate.”
A positive spin is often appropriate, but not after a setback such
as this. Surely the academy members who told the press they would
not even see Brokeback Mountain, yet alone vote for it, deserved
some criticism from GLAAD. Instead, the organization put the Oscar-produced
gay cowboy montage from Sunday’s broadcast on their website.
Given the end results of the evening, there was little humor to
be found in a second viewing of the clips.
None of the press coverage I have seen reflects how much precedent
has been broken. It is substantial. No film in history that has
won the best picture award from both the Los Angeles and New York
Film Critics Association has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until
Brokeback Mountain. No film that has won the producers’, directors’
and writers’ guild awards has ever lost the best picture Oscar,
until Brokeback Mountain. No film that has won the Golden Globe,
the directors’ guild award and led in Oscar nominations, has
ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. I am
at a loss to explain why GLAAD thinks this is something worth celebrating.
To its credit, Crash overcame significant obstacles to win best
picture. It is only the second film in history to win without having
been nominated for the Golden Globe. It is the lowest grossing film
to win since The Last Emperor in 1987. It is the first film since
Rocky in 1976, 30 years ago, to win best picture with only two other
Oscars to its credit. It is the first ensemble drama to win since
Grand Hotel in 1931. And it broke more than 75 years of non-parochial
voting by Academy members to become the first film set in Los Angeles
to take home the golden statue.
Some of us thought that this was the year that a gay-themed film
could break through in the top category. And, clearly, it almost
did. Ang Lee became the first non-white director to be honored as
best director. (I’m sure he earned the respect of every director
in Hollywood when he pointedly forgot to individually thank his
cast.) Oscar voters may have thought that by giving Lee his Oscar,
and rewarding Phillip Seymour Hoffman with the best actor award
for his lisping, negative portrayal of Truman Capote, they had insulated
themselves from charges of homophobia. They were wrong. The decision
to honor Crash with the best picture award, coming after a long,
unprecedented season of wins for Brokeback Mountain in critics’
and guild polls, leaves a bitter taste, reflected in most of the
entertainment industry press.
The shock is perhaps most notably expressed by the LA Times film
critic Kenneth Turan who berated Academy voters in a major article
in Monday’s paper. “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,” he wrote.
“And at least this year, that acting out doomed Brokeback
Mountain.”
Others report widespread distaste for Brokeback among the academy’s
older members, a distaste expressed by Tony Curtis, who told Fox
News that he would not even see the film before voting against it.
The New York Times on Monday quoted an attendee at an Oscar party
who noted, without irony, that older academy voters opposed Brokeback
Mountain because it “diminished” cowboys as iconic figures
in movies. (Remarks like that suggest that the branding of Brokeback
Mountain as a “gay cowboy” film, and the attendant jokes
from late-night comics, defined the movie as something other than
a serious cry from the heart.)
Turan’s opinion, that anti-gay prejudice led to the defeat
of Brokeback Mountain, has clearly hit a nerve. Roger Ebert, one
of the few public voices of support for Crash in the pre-Oscar campaign,
has already responded with a defense of the winner, arguing that
the film was superior. That judgment seems to have lost in the initial
press reports, where the defeat of Brokeback Mountain is being reported
as one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history, and a decision that
is being seen as a stain on Hollywood’s liberal conscience.
To be fair, support for Crash among the actors in the academy appears
to be widespread. It won the Screen Actors Guild award for best
ensemble (an award given to The Birdcage 10 years ago), and actors
make up over 20 percent of the academy’s voters. And its appears
to have been the choice of the Scientologists in the industry, who
provided funding for the film — which also explains why the
ensemble story set in contemporary Los Angeles contained not a single
gay character.
Of course, this is only about Oscars and the movies. Despite George
Clooney’s absurd assertion in his acceptance speech on Sunday
night that Hollywood is a leader in the social arena — an
assertion later endorsed by the Oscar producers with another ridiculous
montage of films on social issues, a montage that inexplicably included
films such as Something’s Gotta Give — Hollywood has
never been a leader in social causes. It never leads; rather, it
reflects. Clooney’s claim that the movie industry was out
front on AIDS issues was perhaps his most far-fetched notion. Despite
its loss of the best picture Oscar, Brokeback Mountain has already
become a cultural phenomenon, and it has earned more than $130 million
world-wide at the box office, making it one of the most financially
successful westerns or gay dramas in history.
It is too early to know what impact the defeat of Brokeback Mountain
will have on other films that have recently been green-lighted as
a result of it’s box office appeal. It will be a shame if
projects such as The Mayor of Castro Street and The Dreyfuss Affair
are now shelved. One certain result will be the loss of many gay
supporters at Oscar parties next year. Rather than a time for escapist
fun, Oscar-time for several years in the future will bring back
memories of the night Brokeback Mountain was denied the top prize
to a vastly inferior film. As one who has viewed the annual program
with enthusiasm for decades, I know I will not be tuning in next
year.
Gregory J. King was the communications director of the Human Rights
Campaign from 1988 to 1995 and has been an Oscar-watcher since childhood.
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