The Oscar that didn't go up the mountain

Last night resulted in a few Oscars for "Brokeback Mountain" – most notably Ang Lee for Best Director – but the film failed to take the top honour.

Should we be surprised? Not really.

Despite its occasional dalliance with controversy, Hollywood is, at its base, conservative, non-risk-taking. For every "Midnight Cowboy" there are a dozen winning films that are neither interesting nor thought-provoking. "Crash", while certainly not firmly in the latter category, really says nothing new. At its core – race relations in Los Angeles. Ho hum. But, it is middle-America enough to be comfortable ground for the voters.

So is that the problem with "Brokeback Mountain"? Yes, and no

According to Larry McMurtry, who did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Brokeback, "Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don't want cowboys to be gay."

Rumours circulated for a few months among insiders that the film didn't stand much of a chance. Why? Because too many of the male voters were uncomfortable with its theme and some of them were even planning not to see it. If true, it's not exactly an even playing field.

But this speaks to something else. These same (or similar) voters were comfortable with Tom Hanks as a gay man dying of AIDS in "Philadelphia" and with Philip Seymour Hoffman as the fey "Capote". Surely then, being gay can't be the problem.

Yes, it can be.

Neither of these characters or films address the every day, common experience of being gay. Homosexuality is a sub-text, almost an afterthought. A man with AIDS and a stereotypically lisping fag are sufficiently far enough removed from the experience of the skittish voters so as to allow them to classify them as "others." They can distance themselves from those realities, because they can in no way become their realities.

Not so with "Brokeback Mountain." What it means to be homosexual is at the core of the movie. It explores how men, caught in inescapable circumstances of their own or of others making, deal with it.

Ennis and Jack are regular, masculine guys. They are married, they have kids, they have money problems, they drink too much, they brawl. Their lives are familiar. Too familiar. It is this commonplaceness that sets the hesitant voters on edge and touches too close to home

Even more threatening is that the film is about love between two men – sexual, passionate, longing, at times brutal, unfulfilled but all-consuming. At first blush, that too may seem foreign to the voters, but I would question who among them hasn't experienced something similar. That two men could feel the same should make them appreciate the universality of what it means to love.

But that's where the problem arises. To accept love between two men, they must accept homosexuality and the physical acts that go along with it. They must acknowledge that there really isn't any difference no matter what the gender of the person one loves and that sex is one expression of that love. For some, or perhaps for many, they cannot or will not cross that imaginary barrier.

Comments

As my young cousin said, he liked 'Crash' the first time around when Spike Lee did it as 'Do the Right Thing.'

Popular posts from this blog

POZ - POZ Army

Sunday Songs: Abbey Lincoln