Last week in the British newspaper the Guardian, E.
Annie Proulx lambasted “conservative heffalump academy
voters” for their failure to bestow the Best Picture Oscar upon the
film adaptation of her short story Brokeback Mountain,
deriding these industry insiders as cowards “living cloistered
lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes” — Ouch!
Hello, AARP? I’m calling to report a hate crime! — “out
of touch” with the “shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment
that is America these days.”
If “yeasty ferment” seems an ambiguous turn of phrase, Proulx
was a bit more forthcoming in an interview with the Missouri Review:
“America is a violent, gun-handling country,” she said. “Americans
feed on a steady diet of bloody movies, television programs, murder
mysteries. Road rage, highway killings, beatings and murder of
those who are different abound; school shootings — almost all of
them in rural areas — make headline news over and over.”
This hardly sounds the sort of cultural milieu from which one
would even desire an award, but since Proulx so clearly
feels her 10,000 word Little Engine That Could has been derailed by
sexually repressed closet Hollywood conservatives and the film the
Pulitzer Prize winning author refers to in her op-ed as
“Trash — excuse me — Crash,” it’s worthwhile to
examine the condensed history/tragic trajectory of Brokeback
Mountain.
It all began when the story was published in one of those
piddling no-name publications, The New Yorker, in 1997.
The near-anonymity of this periodical all but guaranteed the story
would fail to receive any award beyond questionable honors such as
the O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award. Lonesome
Dove author Larry McMurtry bought the rights to the story and
produced a screenplay based on it. Director Ang Lee — best known
for his work on The Ice Storm and another
men-tearing-clothes-off drama, 2003’s The Hulk — attached
himself to the film. Two well-known young actors soon followed
suit.
Unfortunately, even with star power, the $14 million film has
only managed to gross $140 million thus far. Although more than half a dozen
critics’ associations and the Independent Spirit awards declared the film the best picture of the year, it was
shut out at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and won only three
Oscars. Fade to black. Pass the tissues.
HOPEFULLY THE BELLS AND WHISTLES on everyone’s sarcasm detectors
are off the charts now. It can be reasonably said that of all the
short stories written in the last decade, Brokeback
Mountain and its silver screen adaptation have fared better
than average. As the brilliant and ornery Dave Weigel noted, “The ‘gay cowboy movie’
starring the guy from A Knight’s Tale and the guy from
Jarhead has been seen and embraced by more Americans than
the boxing movie [Cinderella Man] starring two Oscar
winners (Crowe and Zellweger).”
It wasn’t even just the awards that got her goat or Jack Twist’s
sheep, for that matter. Everything about Academy Awards night
bothered Proulx and few lived up to her high standards of decorum:
From the first there was “an atmosphere of insufferable
self-importance,” the writer reports, sniffing that Jon Stewart was
“too witty, too quick, too eastern perhaps for the somewhat dim LA
crowd.” (“Too eastern”? Proulx lives in Wyoming for God’s sake.)
Worse, the audience was polite. “There were orders to clap and the
audience obediently clapped,” she complains, as if greeting award
winners with silence was an option in any polite society.
Proulx admits Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Truman
Capote was “brilliant,” but in order to shore up victim status at
the hands of the unenlightened, she sniffs, “Hollywood loves
mimicry,” before asking rhetorically, “which takes more skill,
acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and
who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and
friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters
from imagination and a few cold words on the page?”
Still, any losing nominee could easily blurt out a litany of
complaints similar to Proulx’s. Few will write a screenplay or work
on a film without a belief in the higher worth of the project. As I
posited last year, once a film reaches a certain level of quality
the awards circuit becomes completely
arbitrary and subjective. (How else to explain Russell Crowe’s
Oscar for Gladiator?)
When Proulx chides, “Next year we can look to the awards for
controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a
branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the
debate over free silver,” however, it becomes apparent that for her
it is not subjective or arbitrary. In the mind of someone
for whom ideology trumps artistic merit (or at the very least for
whom the two are inseparable) addressing a certain issue should be
enough to win the award. It’s the Entitlement Culture for the
Pampered Class and they want to get paid.
No doubt some Academy voters felt the same way about
Crash. And how comfortable would Proulx be if she ever
realized her reasoning for why Brokeback Mountain deserved
an Oscar is nearly identical to the demands evangelical Christians
made on behalf of The Passion? A different agenda to be
sure, but the mindset and tactics are identical.
More than 200 films receive a wide release or something
approximating it every year. When recognition as one of the top
five out of those 200 is not enough, take a deep breath and start
ignoring your publicist’s calls. The convergence of self-importance
and hyperbolic press releases is clouding your judgment.
