'Brokeback' Riding High In Oscar Race

Gay Love Story Leads With 8 Nominations

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 31 It was a year for movies with grown-up themes -- about lonesome cowboys and political assassins and bigoted yuppies -- as Hollywood favored the smaller, somber and morally complex films of 2005 and mostly ignored for top honors the studio blockbusters that featured teen wizards, Lord Vader and the big monkey.

The love story of two handsome ranch hands, "Brokeback Mountain," led the Academy Award nominations Tuesday with nods in eight categories, including Best Picture, Best Director for Ang Lee, Best Actor for Heath Ledger and Best Supporting Actor for Jake Gyllenhaal.

For best film Oscar also liked "Capote," about writer Truman Capote's troubled telling of the brutal murder of a farm family in rural Kansas; "Crash," an ensemble story of colliding lives and the racial boil of Los Angeles; "Good Night, and Good Luck," about CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's on-air battle against the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy; and "Munich," the Steven Spielberg thriller about conflicted Israeli agents sent to kill the Palestinians responsible for the attack on Jewish athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.

With the exception of "Munich," the top-nominated films were all less costly works with smaller box-office tallies -- as opposed to the blockbuster bids of years past. There were no hobbits. No gladiators. No Chicago and all that jazz.

"Holy sheep. I can't believe it," said Gyllenhaal, who plays the herder who headed up Brokeback Mountain and shares his tent with Ledger's character.

"This is a year for the movies and the stories they tell," Gyllenhaal said. "A search for the truths we feel we're looking for right now." He said it's right that the academy picked films with adult themes this year, "because movies should be made by adults, made with a conscience, by adults who care." He added that it's good for cinema that many of the films vying for top awards were made with relatively tight budgets and that little movies like his found an audience.

"Brokeback" has been the source of lots of speculation about America's feelings on gay romance. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for their transformation of the Annie Proulx short story. McMurtry, who authored "Lonesome Dove," called the source material "one of the greatest works ever to address the American West." Talking on the phone while driving across the desert outside Palm Springs on Tuesday, McMurtry said the story is not one about gay cowboys. "It's about loneliness," he said, and deprivation and losing. "There's nothing political about it," he said. "There's nothing glamorous about it."

The most expensive and most popular movies of 2005 fared only so-so in the Oscar race. Peter Jackson's $200 million ape epic, "King Kong," received nominations for Art Direction, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" received one nomination, as did the final installment of George Lucas's life work, "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," which was nominated for Best Makeup (and got zip for Visual Effects, for which Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic operation is famous).

"War of the Worlds" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" got three noms each, all for technical achievements.

This year all of the Best Film nominees were also included in the Best Director honors -- a rarity that's happened only three times previously (1958, 1965, 1982).

Oscar handicappers had considered the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line" a good fit for a Best Picture nod, but it was not to be. The academy members instead nominated its two leads -- Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor for his turn as the man in black and Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress for her portrayal of June Carter Cash.

The Best Actress category included familiar faces in less familiar films. In addition to Witherspoon for "Walk the Line" and Charlize Theron as a sexually harassed single mom in the Minnesota mines of "North Country," there was Judi Dench for "Mrs. Henderson Presents"; Felicity Huffman, of TV's "Desperate Housewives," for "Transamerica"; and Keira Knightley for the Jane Austen adaptation "Pride & Prejudice."