What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2005

The Year: 2005

What the Nominees Were: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: The Squid and the Whale was a great coming of age tale. Over in France, The Child was a heartbreaker.

What Did Win: Crash
How It’s Aged: Terribly. A bunch of smugly-satisfied and all-too-tidy parables about race that only a wealthy white person could dream up. And writer-director Paul Haggis turned out to be a bad guy.

What Should’ve Won: Brokeback Mountain
How Hard Was the Decision: Not exactly hard! This is the most frequently cited Oscar injustice.

Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx
Stars: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams

The Story: Two cowboys (shepherds actually) fall for each other on a long summer alone up on the titular mountain. Afterwards, they both return to their homes to marry women and have kids, but they reunite many times for “fishing trips” over the next twenty years, until one of them dies from what may have been a gay-bashing.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Director, Adapted Screenplay and Score. It lost Picture, Actor for Ledger, Supporting Actor for Gyllenhaal, Supporting Actress for Williams, and Cinematography.
Why It Didn’t Win: Three guesses! There were several interviews with the aging population of Oscar voters in which they said that gay stuff was too inherently gross to them. The Academy was hugely criticized for this decision, so they inducted a boatload of young voters to keep it from happening again.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This was a story that needed to be told. The time had finally come to tell America’s first great gay romantic epic. McMurtry had written screenplays about cowboys before, and Lee had directed a movie about gay protagonists, but only by putting that together did they produce the best movie either would ever touch. As McMurtry says on the DVD, “It’s been laying there in the west for a long long time, attraction between cowboys.” (And I shouldn’t short Ossana’s contribution. In their interview, they say that McMurtry focused on the women but Ossana focused on the men “Larry seems to think that I have more intuitiveness about the men than he does.”)
   
2. How do you write beautifully? It’s easy: put a lot of big beautiful dialogue into your characters’ mouths. But great writers can tell stories about anybody, even a hero like Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar, who can barely communicate longer than a grunt. As Hathaway says, “When he talks, the words are punching themselves out of his mouth.” In the end, it’s probably Ennis’s silence that allows him to survive, as opposed to Jack, who may have said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
   
3. All the actors make it clear that Ennis was the perfect avatar for Lee himself, who is just as silent off camera as Ennis is on camera. As Ledger says “He doesn’t say too much, but when he does it’s somewhat kind of poetic and profound… Ang is a beautiful beautiful person, complex, quiet, mysterious character”
4. A 30 page short story has been expanded into an epic, covering many years and life changes. The shocking thing is how many faces pop up that would go on to be familiar, including Linda Cardellini, Anna Ferris, Kate Mara, and even David Harbor as Gyllenhaal’s new romantic prospect! Give it up to casting director Avy Kaufman for spotting potential talent.
   
5. As the two men play with fire over the course of 20 years, everyone else in their lives eventually pieces together the truth, one by one. The looks on their faces as they realize are all examples of Lee’s super-subtle directorial brilliance. (Most of them slightly harden their eyes when they figure out they’ve been deceived. Only Jack’s mom softens them.)
   
6. How did cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto make the mountain look so gorgeous? Partially by making the towns intentionally ugly, causing us to long for the romantic idylls when they finally arrive. (Every time the Wyoming-ites appear on screen I couldn’t keep from thinking, “These miserable people have 20x as much representation as me in the Senate. They should be ecstatic.”)