The Oscar nominations: Brokeback leads the pack

Same here.

Arrgh, I didn't like Crash. Blech. I guess "subtlety" was not word of the day at the Oscars...

I wanna watch the Oscars with Soz, we notice all the same things-- the asymmetrical boobies, the "those are pregnancy boobies," the lameness of the interpretive dance w/ the Crash song...

Well that was kinda fun, though I wish I could just watch a highlights reel right up front - and the Oscar goes to and the Oscar goes to and the Oscar goes to. Skip the pleasantries, just hand out the goodies.

'Hustle & Flow" song, which won the Oscar for best song, thank you very much.
And the dance imterpretation wasn't so lame, considering the song's subject matter. It was probably something quite foreign to many viewers tho. It was a hoot. Can't believe it actually won!

Yeah, whoops! What was I thinking?! That's embarrassing...I guess I'm just relating anything I thought was dorky to Crash...

Although, I did find the interpretive dance for "Into the Deep" (the *actual* Crash song) quite dorky too...Sorry, but the slow motion molestation in the background was just a bit much for my tastes...

It's the Oscars. You always hold your breath when they're presenting the songs.

They still use the word "actress", as in "Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role"???

I thought Hollywood was way more PC than that!

They could've said something quintessentially PC like "Best Performance by an Actor who happens to be a Female in a Leading Role."

You are so foul but was she the hottest thing there or what?
She was sitting behind Reese Weatherspoon, I think, and when the camera showed Reese while her name was being called for Best Actress, you couldn't even focus on her for all of that gorgeous bronze sultriness resting behind her. Selma Hayek is fierce!

Where's LW? Is he still unconcious behind the loss? :wink:

Cyphercat, yeah, and what did you think of Dolly Parton? Love the gal, but it was painful to look at her. Her lips were the only thing moving on her face for all the Botox that had been injected, and the boob-(does it all come back to boobies?)-to-waist ratio was plain scary.

Salma Hayek is fierce indeed.

I haven't seen ANY of the movies (that'll be remedied soon, I hope), so I don't have any particular feelings one way or the other for "Crash." Was rooting for Brokeback 'cause of the story. It got at least two, not sure how many total. (Haven't read recaps yet.)

Loved Crash, and I am really glad it won. Vinsan has a complete listing. I didn't watch the Oscars so I cannot comment further.

(Three for Brokeback, I noted all of them here as they happened, just forgot the first one [score]. The others were best adapted screenplay and best director.)

I was pretty happy that 'King Kong' received a few awards. Many people panned it but I thought Kong was a rootin'-tootin' rollercoaster ride of a movie.

What I find fascinating, always, is when actors from various movies step up to the mic to present an award and out comes these voices that you've never heard before, with foreign accents. It's always a surprise. Eric Bana, Naomi Watts, Heath Ledger, Rachel Weisz, etc.

Actually, eoe, "King Kong" did very well with critics:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/king_kong/

It won't make the pack of dough that the LOTR films did but with a DVD release, it will make a tidy sum for Universal and Jackson.

/couldn't log on for a week . . . catching up . . . Rachel Weisz is pregnant, which is why she was more endowed than usual.

People in literature are people schooled in and/or interested in literature. Why are you so unusually huffy, lightwizard?

Sour grapes? Really!

I make no claims about knowing anything about physics and engineering -- which are at least allied with your expertise -- but I sure as hell know a great deal about literature and theatre and film. There are many popular writers who are not great. Proulx is not. If, as you say, that phone conversation between Jack's widow and Ennis is in the story and if I had received the story as a class assignment, I'd have had the student re-write it.

Now, from a woman's perspective, when Mrs. Twist and the minor woman character had the dinner table conversation and Mrs. Twist said she was a Tri-Delt, I flinched in the theatre, because that's reference was one way a certain type of woman -- were she creating a fictional character -- would insult said character. Not by simply making her a sorority girl but a Delta-Delta-Delta.

Back to page seven.

Prior to the Oscars, I was going to write that I felt that Brokeback's popularity was due more to the personal artistic respect the film making community has for Ang Lee as well as the appearance of being a pretty nice guy. I think people like him personally and professionally.

I never heard of Crash until reading this thread, so I hope the movie has a post-Oscar run-through.

I would have had a hard time deciding between Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Both were amazing, particularly when you consider they played real life people of recent memory.

When Clooney received the Best Supporting Actor, I was as disappointed as he was. I immediately felt he wouldn't win for director or writer. Amazing man.

That Clooney outing is an engrossing and amazing performance in "Syriana" and it makes the film worth the time spent. It's really spot on to the real character.

We could debate all day how well Proulx writes or doesn't writes and it won't change our opinion. "The Shipping News" is one of the best novels I've read in ten years. "Brokeback Mountain" one of the best short stories.

I just watched Crash and I saw nothing exceptional in it whatsoever. Batman forever was a better movie. Crash just wasn't that good.



March 10, 2006, 9:26PM
'Brokeback' backlash against 'Crash'? That's progress


By CLARENCE PAGE


Fate is indeed fickle. Who would have guessed that in this year's Oscar voting, Brokeback Mountain, a fine, risky movie about a gay love affair, would surge ahead of Capote, a movie about a gay journalist, only to be edged out for the Best Picture Oscar by a fine, risky movie about racism?

Is this a sign of our times, or what? If conservatives needed any evidence that liberal impulses have taken over the Motion Picture Academy, this is it. Right? But, alas, in some folks' minds, every silver lining has its cloud. Instead of celebrating, many fans of Brokeback Mountain are singing the blues, charging that their favorite flick was denied its rightful Oscar by ... guess what?

"I think that's an absolute horror," Brad Bruner, a leader in the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's an outright sign of homophobia in our country. (Crash) won no awards before this. It makes me sick." That's right. "Homophobia." There's just no pleasing some folks. Critic Kenneth Turan expressed similar sentiments in the Los Angeles Times, writing that "Crash provided the perfect safe harbor" for those who were "discomfited" by Brokeback Mountain but wanted to "feel like they were good, productive liberals."

Nikki Finke in the LA Weekly put "Hollywood's homophobia" "on a par with Pat Robertson's." Whoa! My condolences to all for their disappointment, but the above-mentioned movies don't sound to me like Robertson's Top 10 list, unless he was denouncing them.

Nevertheless, liberal optimist that I am, I think it says something quite positive about the progress of this country's common culture that a movie as edgy about race and ethnicity as Crash would be viewed as a "safe" choice.

The best movies try to tell us something significant about the way we live now. With that in mind, I think the Academy made the right choice with Crash, a small movie that dared to grapple with America's most vexing perennial problem, the heat beneath its melting pot.

Crash director Paul Haggis started writing the movie after he and his wife were held up by two black youths on a Los Angeles street, and his passion shows on the screen. Yet the script tries to allow no preconceived notions about race, liberal or conservative, to go unchallenged.

His ensemble cast creates archetypes, then contradicts their stereotypes in multiple interlocking stories of whites, blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Iranians, cops, criminals, the rich, the poor, movers and shakers and those who get moved and shaken. Haggis, who also won top writing honors last year for Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, surprises us with characters whose inner natures contradict their outer appearance, good or evil, making them as complicated and inexplicable as people we know in real life.

There's the young black male played by hip-hop artist "Ludacris" complaining about white people's fear of young black males ?- just before he pulls out a gun and carjacks two white yuppies played by Brendan Frazer and Sandra Bullock.

There's also the white racist cop, played impressively by Oscar-nominated Matt Dillon, who gets us to hate him by abusing a wealthy black couple during a traffic stop. Then Dillon pulls an emotional whiplash on us by showing us the sources of the cop's anger, particularly the heartless bureaucratic HMO that won't pay for the pain-relieving medicine his ailing father needs.

In this and other scenes, Crash presents today's intergroup conflicts in a way you seldom see on the news, as outer expressions of inner, personal pain. It's not a perfect film. Its drama often grows out of outlandish coincidences, as if Los Angeles only had a couple dozen people living in it. But, the same could be said of many of Charles Dickens' tales. Besides, the coincidence amazingly works, as if even big, daunting L.A. can be brought down to size by the smallness of our minds, when, like Bullock's character, we're "angry all the time and don't know why."

Crash tells us a lot about this year and these times, in which old prejudices have not disappeared as much as they've gone global, taking in new ethnic fears, suspicions and resentments.

Hollywood usually follows movie mogul Sam Goldwyn's mantra: "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." When Best Actress winner, Reese Witherspoon, quoted June Carter Cash saying, "I'm just trying to matter," she might well have been speaking for what Hollywood shows off at awards time. No one can say for certain whether message movies like Crash or Brokeback Mountain matter in the long run, but I hope they do.

Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C.

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I enjoyed looking at the gorgeous Salma Hayek in her green dress.

What concerns me, lightwizard, is on the one hand, you cite favorable critical reaction to Brokeback, but, when I tell you that literary people do not think prizes are a sign of the merit of a book, you huffily state that those literary people are jealous.

Of course, since I am a person suspcious of literary prizes, just to watch the Oscars is to engage in the same sort of cpntradiction, although I do watch them, in part, to fashion peep.

I can not remember whether I wrote here or elsewhere about post-Nobel winning writers' names having been borrowed by their publishers to cover novels written by grad students. I wish I had saved the article when it originally appeared.

Were you to ask me what the best book I read in 10 years is -- and I read far more history than fiction and a great deal of Medieval work -- I would have to say Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

Now, I saw Syriana last night and was upset by it.

A secret I have to reveal is not many literary types can follow espionage/industrial spy works. Syriana was based on a book -- whether or not it was novel, I don't know -- but largely in a glancing way, according to what I read.

The movie was murky but I think it was intended to be so, because the Clooney portrayed character really didn't what he was involved in. That was made apparent by the woman "boss'" statement that "Bob," Clooney's character, was involved in "entreprenurial" activities. The statement was SUPPOSED to make the audience question whether he conducted the opening transaction -- the sale of the missile -- on his own or under orders.

The viewer has two choices. My criticism of the phone conversation between the Widow Twist and Ennis in Brokeback is that there are many levels of questioning. In the end, the viewer no longer cares.

Now, Boston Globe movie critic Wesley Morris did a piece on Hollywood homophobia in the snub of Brokeback. I responded. May not have time today to retrieve my response, but I sent it to the friend who forwarded me Morris' article and to Morris himself.