The Oscars are awards that supposedly don't matter to almost anyone: the winning films are increasingly irrelevant at the box office and the gala's audiences are decreasing: we have gone from 43.7 million viewers in 2014 to less than 19 last year.
However, this reduction does not prevent their controversies from being amplified and, immersed in the culture of immediacy, the drama no longer takes place during the ceremony, but after the nominations.
The exclusion of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie in the categories of direction and lead actress respectively has meant that every day since the names of the candidates to collect the statuettes were announced on March 10, we have read news about the supposed snub to
Barbie
.
Some as unique as Ryan Gosling's statement stating that “there is no Ken without Barbie” or Hillary Clinton's tweet jumping on the doll's bandwagon.
The opposite effect has also occurred: some critics who spared their opinion now speak to justify these absences — “
Barbie
is bad.”
She's already there.
I have said it,” wrote Pamela Paul in
The New York Times
— and point out that they were not due to a campaign orchestrated by
the Kens
of the Academy against feminism, but simply a matter of voter taste.
Perhaps to refute the accusation of endemic machismo in Hollywood, one would only have to look at last year's gala, in which
Everything at the same time everywhere
won , a film starring three physically and emotionally powerful women, or at those of the previous two years when two women, Jane Campion and Chloé Zhao, won the award for best director.
There was a time when sexism within the Academy was undisguisable, but that is changing in some aspects, so much so that today it is not news that in almost all categories there are nominated films with LGTBQ themes, other of the great snubs in history of the Oscars.
Thus
Maestro
, Rustin, Nyad
or
The Color Purple
aspire to win statuettes.
It is also not news that gay actors like Colman Domingo and Jodie Foster play gay characters.
More information
“I suck at everything other than acting”: Cillian Murphy, the most humble Oscar nominee in history
But less than twenty years ago it was difficult for the Academy to accept that a love story starred two men.
It is difficult to believe that sexism has caused us to lose nominations in 2024, but on March 5, 2006, a film did lose the Oscar because of homophobia.
Two men living together on a ranch
The inaudible
“wow”
that was read on Jack Nicholson's lips after pronouncing a word that no one expected:
Crash
, the title of the film about racial tensions in Los Angeles by the almost debutant Paul Haggins, reflected a general feeling.
He lived in homes, in the newsrooms of the specialized press and in the Kodak Theater, where the victory of
Brokeback Mountain
seemed certain.
Even the cast of the winning film seemed to not believe it, their overflowing joy competing with the gestures of disbelief.
What had happened?
To explain it, you have to go back seven years before that night, when
Brokeback Mountain
was just a short story by Annie Proulx published in
The New Yorker
that screenwriter Diana Ossana passed on to her colleague Larry McMurtry.
“I knew before I even got halfway through that it was a masterpiece,” McMurtry told
Out
years later .
They asked Proulx for permission to adapt it and the writer accepted, although she did not understand how it could be transformed into a film.
The real difficulty did not lie in the script, in which they gave more space to the stories of the protagonists' wives, Alma and Lureen, and their family environment, but in finding someone who dared to carry it out.
The first name to approach him was obvious: Gus Van Sant.
The main exponent of queer
cinema
believed that the project would only make sense with two big stars at the helm and tested the main ones.
Josh Harnett was interested but committed to
The Black Dahlia
, and Matt Damon turned it down, arguing that after playing a gay role in
The Talented Mr. Ripley , and a
cowboy
role
in
All the Beautiful Horses,
his next project couldn't be a
gay
cowboy
Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Phillippe and Brad Pitt did not accept either, and Mark Wahlberg was especially explicit in rejecting the project "It was too graphic, descriptive, about spitting on one's hand, preparing to do it...".
Unable to recruit any luminaries, Van Sant abandoned the project.
They approached Pedro Almodóvar, but the man from La Mancha missed more sex in the script: “What can two men do living together on a ranch?” he commented on the matter.
Ang Lee shows his Oscar for best director for 'Brokeback Mountain' at one of the parties after the gala. Kevin Winter (Getty Images)
It was Diana Ossana who thought of Ang Lee.
In
The Wedding Feast
(1993)
He had dealt with the LGTBQ theme and if with
Tiger and Dragon
he had been able to get the American public to read subtitles he could face any challenge, but Lee was committed to
Hulk
(2003).
He rejected the project, although he felt so moved by the script that after finishing his work with Marvel and discovering that the project was still orphan, he embarked on it.
All that was left was to find the actors.
Jake Gyllenhaal, who had always been interested in the story, offered Lee and it was Ossana's teenage daughter who suggested Heath Ledger to play the laconic Ennis del Mar.
Naomi Watts, his girlfriend at the time, urged him to accept the role—if he had known that during filming Ledger would fall in love with his co-star, Michelle Williams, he might not have been so enthusiastic.
When Lee saw them together for the first time he had no doubt that she had found his cowboy.
The choice of his wives was controversial: both Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway were associated with the youth audience, one with
Dawson Grows Up
and the other with
Princess Surprise
.
The four protagonists, Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Williams and Hathaway, were in their early 20s, but incredibly talented and had unwavering faith in the project they had just embarked on.
Crash!
There was a buzz in Hollywood.
The “gay cowboys” movie caused hilarity (and some resentment) in the adults.
In his eyes it was an attack against the
western
, the sacrosanct genre on which the image of the American heterosexual man had been founded and which had only been challenged under tons of subtext, as occurred in the famous gun scene between John Ireland and Montgomery. Clift in
Río Rojo
(1948), by Howards Hawks, which revealed the essential
The Hidden Celluloid
.
Critics adored it and in theaters the nervous laughter heard at the beginning turned into heartbreak as the story developed.
With a budget of less than 15 million dollars, it grossed more than 170. The eight Oscar nominations only reinforced its success and made it the star of the gala: for the first time a film with a homosexual couple as the protagonist aspired to the Oscar for the best movie.
Competing alongside it was another story with a gay man in the lead,
Truman Capote.
Good night and good luck
,
Munich
and
Crash
completed the quintet.
The awards race followed a predictable path:
Brokeback Mountain
swept the board, taking home the Gold Cup at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Globe, the Critics Choice Awards and the Bafta, and the night before the Oscars it triumphed at the Independent Spirit Awards.
It was the clear favorite, followed many horses away from
Crash,
which had been released months before and had as its main attraction the change of record of Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser.
The evening started well for Lee's film: the original music won for the delicate soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla and Ossana and McMurtry won the award for best adapted screenplay.
That the editing went to
Crash
raised some eyebrows and neither Ledger nor Gyllenhaal won the acting awards, but that year they had owners: Philip Seymour Hoffman had metamorphosed into Truman Capote and the Academy was not going to leave the effort unrewarded. of George Clooney for making himself ugly in
Syriana
.
Ang Lee won the best director award as expected and was backstage waiting to join the finale party when a word from Jack Nicholson changed everything.
Heath Ledger, nominated for his role in 'Brokeback Mountain', at the Kodak Theater on Oscar night.J.
Vespa (WireImage)
While the large cast of
Crash celebrated, the disgruntled gesture of the
Brokeback Mountain
team could be glimpsed
.
The dream had vanished: that brave little film was one step away from making history and the word “surprise” was the most repeated in the chronicles of the gala.
An angry Annie Proulx wrote an open letter in
The Guardian
titled
Blood on the Red Carpet
in which she spared no qualifications.
She defined the academics as “the typical idiotic Los Angeles crowd” and referred to
Crash
as
Trash
.
She accused the Academy of being homophobic and suggested that the Church of Scientology, to which Paul Haggins then belonged, had something to do with that decision.
Proulx felt that the Academy had not understood the message: for her it was essential that people understood that that film was not a romantic story but a story of homophobia and intolerance.
Ang Lee's film is a film about the opposite of love and its ending does not leave even a glimmer of hope.
Crash,
however, spoke of redemption on the streets of Los Angeles, a landscape much more recognizable than the snowy peaks of Wyoming.
It was also a film that the actors liked, it had won the Union Award, and the actors are the largest group in the Academy.
In addition, it offered an unusual diversity before #OscarsSoWhite turned its absence into a cry, something that many minorities probably appreciated.
Perhaps there were simply more voters who found it easy to identify with the helplessness of Thandie Newton's character or the Persian family trying to prosper in a hostile environment than with a pair of attractive white men herding sheep.
Crash
appealed to the multiple minorities that make up the United States and was the only nominee for the main award to do so.
However, there were two stories that year that told LGTBQ stories,
Brokeback Mountain
and
Truman Capote
, something that could have divided the vote.
Diana Ossana shows her Oscar for best adapted screenplay for 'Brokeback Mountain.Mark Mainz (Getty Images)
It is undeniable that homophobia was a determining factor.
China banned its screening and some theaters in the United States refused to schedule it.
Furthermore, actors like Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgine openly censored it: “If John Wayne were alive, they would have walked over his corpse to film it!” bellowed the protagonist of
Marty
.
Screenwriter Diana Ossana confessed that she knew they were out of the race when a couple of weeks before the gala she discovered that her idol, Clint Eastwood, a member of the Academy, had not even seen her.
And that was the key: many academics did not want to see it.
Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey received the Crash
team on the set of the most watched program on television
and told how she had experienced moments as humiliating because of her race as those described in the film.
That it is easy to understand why it did not win does not prevent that two decades later that gala continues to be a masterful example of the Academy's errors.
Ten years later,
The Hollywood Reporter
did a survey of hundreds of academics to find out what they would have voted at that time and
Brokeback Mountain
beat
Crash,
which came last in its category.
Even its own director, Paul Haggis, acknowledged that he would not have voted for his film if it had been up to him to do so as an academic. “Was it the best film of the year?
I don't think so".
We had to wait twelve years before
Moonlight
finally became the first film starring gay men to win the main category.
Since then, times have changed so much that today what is surprising is that in a film as supposedly progressive as
Barbie
, sexual diversity shines only in its subtext.
Almost like John Ireland and Montgomery Clift in
Red River.
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