“Wish I knew how to quit you…”
Jack in Brokeback Mountain …
Hollywood wishes it knew how to quit Brokeback Mountain, the abomination that is staring at its face and is screaming for recognition along with two very potent gay themed movies, Capote and Transamerica. And today when the Academy Awards were announced, Hollywood sure did find a way to stop this years Oscars from being a gay one, as it was widely pitted to be.
Now one can’t hold that against the Academy, as most people will say, it did recognize these movies by nominating them, and why should it at all make it a “cause” year ?
After all Oscars are about rewarding good movies aren’t they?
Yes they are and in one of the most cinematically rewarding years Hollywood has seen in years, Brokeback Mountain is easily the best film and Felicity Hufman’s portrayal of a man on verge of becoming a woman, undoubtedly the most effective performance, but then why weren’t they rewarded ??? Maybe because they had the misfortune of being released in the same year, one cannot after all hand over all the major awards to gay themed movies, that would be sacrilege …
And to think 37 years ago, the academy did the most daring -- it gave the Best Film award to John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy -- another gay themed film. But today's Academy is mostly uncomfortable with a film that deals with real love between two men. So for people who were discomforted by Brokeback Mountain but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, Crash provided the perfect safe harbor.
Eventually, as Brokeback’s Jack will say “it’s nobody’s business but ours”…
Monday, March 06, 2006
Posted by serendipiduous at 11:58 PM
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5 comments:
Hi! just coming around to say good-by! I'll never forget ya, because every time i make 'chingri malai curry' I'll think of you :)
Chow! l>t
hey I hav not seen either brokeback or crash. But what u say seems to be true. These awards are not really merit based. The outcomes are backed by heavy campaigning, filling pockets n all. No ! not that it is all bribery, but these awards are certainly not based on pure merit. However one cannot totally blame them. After all art or for the matter of fact life is so subjective. Who knows ? What matters is that both crash and brokeback seem to be good cinema. Good expression. Good Ideas . . .
and you know what the funny thing is? is either one of the two films had own, then no body would have remembered that the academy supposedly rewards "good" films....then everyone will be academy bashing, claiming they were trying to be politically correct....remember the time denzel and hally won?
but whats frustrating is the rigidity of the institution which sometimes has pretensions of being liberal...
the key word here, my dear, is pretensions....
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