In the Best Film Race, the Question Is Not Who but Why

He'll drink to that: Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote," which wins the Post critics' Best Picture derby, 2-1. (By Attila Dory -- Sony Pictures Classics Via Associated Press)

Stephen Hunter

Come next Sunday, the winner of the Oscar for Best Picture will be . . . "Capote." And "Brokeback Mountain" will do well in other, compensatory races.

"Capote" deserves to win, of course, but that has nothing to do with it. "Capote" will win for the following reason: All 6,000-odd members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences vote for Best Picture. Many of the members are older, haven't worked in years or worked in the crafts or the sciences but not the arts. They aren't the young, angry, liberal Hollywood that gets all the press. Really, they aren't that much different from any average block in Kensington: prosperous middle-class people who remember (and prefer) the way it used to be.

They don't want to see "Brokeback." They're not homophobic. They're not anti-gay marriage. They want no one persecuted, prosecuted, marginalized, ignored. They want everyone to be happy. They wish no one ill as long as their retirement benefits aren't threatened. They just don't want to see handsome young men kissing.

Fret and frown all you want, but they don't like it when men kiss. So all these people will receive their "Brokeback" DVDs from the academy and watch up to about Minute 43, that cold night when the snow's a-fallin' and poor Ennis is out there on his damn lonesome, and Jack Twist yells, "Hey, Ennis, git on in here, boy, you'll freeze solid in the cold."

Men kiss.

The DVDs go off, all over Burbank.

The vote for "Capote" rises because of the "Brokeback Mountain" campaign. It's a nice movie that salutes a great American who happened to be homosexual. It's the one where there is no kissing.

It can't miss.

Desson Thomson

It's not an ironclad rule that the Best Picture winner incorporate the American dream, but it certainly adds thematic luster. Somehow it feels right. People can look back at that year and think: That was when the academy honored "The Best Years of Our Lives" or "The Godfather." Somehow, the whole year was about that picture.

"Capote" fulfills this dual quality. It's a fine picture in its own right, and it resonates American. In 1959, when the Bergdorf-scarfed, thin-voiced writer Truman Capote decided to write a book about the gruesome murders of a Kansas family, he caught America at several crucial crossroads. It was a time when urbanization and suburbanization were redefining the existential topography of the country, when rural living -- and its code of tight-lipped faith and stoic, self-governed responsibility -- was going the way of the cowboy.

When drifters Perry Smith and Dick Hickock executed farmer Herb Clutter and his family in cold blood, it was new America killing old America. This also marked the new era of grisly fame, when soulless, random violence would become the subject of tabloids, television and books, and the era of fame for fame's sake, when Capote and others would live off their celebrity as though it were a trust fund.

Of course, beyond the sweeping themes of "Capote," there is also this: a stunning performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman, which pulls Capote's analog life into our digital existence. If Capote's book, "In Cold Blood" captured that time, "Capote" the movie bookmarks Capote into The System for good.

Ann Hornaday

The best movie of the year was "Capote," but when the Oscars are handed out next Sunday, "Brokeback Mountain" will win Best Picture. And it should.

This is because the Best Picture category has never been strictly about artistic merit. (How else to explain why "Rocky" beat out both "Network" and "Taxi Driver" in 1977?) Instead, the award for Best Picture has historically been bestowed on films that, while cinematically ambitious, have also enjoyed commercial success, the buzz and sizzle that reignite filmgoers' interest in going to the movies. The Best Picture Oscar is the movie industry's way of saying thanks to a film that has done the most to raise all their boats. (Of course, by this rule, "The Passion of the Christ" should have won last year, but religion has always been more problematic for Hollywood than sex.)

"Brokeback Mountain," as I wrote in my review, is a seriously flawed film -- it's too much a captive of its literary provenance, too precious and inert to be considered great cinema. Still, no one can argue that what many predicted would be a niche movie has jumped its demographic to become a red state-blue state phenomenon, one that has spawned countless Internet parodies and its own catchphrase. (The "Lazy Sunday" and "Brokeback Mountain" mash-up: the zeitgeist come full circle?)

All four of its competitors -- "Capote," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Crash" and "Munich" -- are probably better movies. But none of them has generated the interest, or infiltrated the culture, like "Brokeback Mountain."