Gay Love Story Leads With 8 Nominations
By William Booth and Sonya Geis
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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."
"It's pretty [expletive] cool!" Huffman said about her Oscar wake-up call Tuesday. Not many filmgoers have seen the movie about a preoperative male-to-female transsexual who suddenly discovers she has a son -- but it's been embraced by many critics.
Huffman said she was still hopping up and down after hearing her name read. "My life has been pretty spectacular," she said. "I'm one lucky girl."
She took a deep breath and thought about the academy's choices for movie nominations this year. "Theater is a reflective art form and I wonder if the same is true for movies," she said. "Politically, we're more on the right than ever. Maybe socially we're moving toward understanding and healing."
For the Oscars this year, politics comes with the popcorn. George Clooney finds himself in three races: for Best Supporting Actor as the CIA operative in Middle East oil thriller "Syriana" and for Best Director and Original Screenplay for "Good Night, and Good Luck."
Grant Heslov, who wrote the "Good Night" screenplay with Clooney, said the two had kicked the idea around for some time. "Murrow was somebody who was talked about in George's house -- his father was a journalist," Heslov said.
The film re-creates Murrow's television shows using the exact words the newsman spoke when the shows first aired. Heslov said the verisimilitude is important because "the truth is, this is not a biopic, it's a film about five episodes of television, when Murrow went after McCarthy."
Heslov said his friendship with Clooney dates to an acting class in Los Angeles where they met 20 years ago. "What's it like working with George? He's a pain in the [butt]. So demanding." Heslov was joking. "No, it's fun. We'll work and then [mess] around and then work some more. It's fun."
He added that he learned of his nomination, announced before dawn on the West Coast, while "I was on my 26th mile of running." Maybe he was getting giddy.
"I'm totally kidding," he continued. "I was gardening. No, I was in bed listening on a radio. I didn't wake my wife up." Until he heard his name. "I started making some noise," he said. "I started jabbing my wife and woke her up."
In the documentary feature category, one of the nominees was the popular family fare "March of the Penguins."
"Yes, the little folks in the tuxedos have done well," said Luc Jacquet, the film's director, speaking from his home in France. The documentary is the second highest grossing ever (after Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11"). Jacquet said he believes it is because humans can relate to the emperor penguin, "the strength of his character, his force, his will, the sparseness of his life and where he lives." When Jacquet mentioned that he is at work on another documentary set in nature, we said we hoped it would be warmer than Antarctica in winter. "Yes, thanks, warmer," he said.
Speaking of tuxedos: Dana Adam Shapiro, one of the two filmmakers (along with Henry Alex Rubin) of the nominated documentary "Murderball," was surprised. "Ever since 'Grizzly Man' was not shortlisted, I was wondering what the criteria were," he said. (Shapiro was referring to the decision by the academy not to nominate Werner Herzog's doc about a nature lover from Malibu who lived with the brown bears of Alaska -- until they ate him. Herzog took top prize for the film from the Directors Guild of America over the weekend.)
"Murderball" follows a group of wheelchair athletes over two years and was shot in Texas, Virginia, Florida, Canada, Greece and Sweden. Shapiro said he supported himself during the long project with the publication of a novel, "The Every Boy," and savings from his previous job as a senior editor at Spin magazine. He also lived on the cheap.
"If you don't drink in public, you save a lot of money," Shapiro said. "And I ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I also lived with my grandma for a little bit."
Shapiro spoke from his bed at home in New York, where he has spent the last couple of days with a sore throat. He said he watched "Good Morning America" Tuesday morning to find out who had been nominated, "and the only category they didn't announce was documentary."
"I think they have a separate red carpet for us," he said. Shapiro added that he needs a tuxedo for the awards ceremony in March. "I was told that for an Oscar, you can get a free one. Is that true?" he asked. "I don't think I'd help the brand, though. I guess I'll buy one."
Hany Abu Assad, who directed and co-wrote the nominated documentary "Paradise Now," about two Palestinian suicide bombers in Tel Aviv, said his nomination is important not only for him "but also for people on the street in Palestine."
"They are desperately seeking hope for recognition, and this gives them hope," he said. The film recently took a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, and Assad said he was surprised to find that many Palestinians took pride in the win. "The elite know who you are, the journalists write about you, but not [usually] people on the street, the people driving buses," he said. "Even people who were not happy with the film were proud."
Assad is now in Hollywood, where he moved to pursue his next project, a film about how the American Dream looks to people from Third World nations. He learned of his nomination via a wake-up call from co-writer and producer Bero Beyer in the Netherlands.
"Just to be part of this great bunch of films, and you're one of them, it's amazing," Assad said.
For Best Animated Feature, the academy nominated "Howl's Moving Castle," "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" and "Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit."
Individual branches of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominate contenders -- directors nominate directors, screenwriters for writers, costumers for costumers -- but the entire membership of 5,800 may vote in any category for the winners. The 78th Academy Awards show will air March 5 on ABC, hosted by Jon Stewart.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.