List of Accolades Received By Brokeback Mountain - Post-Academy Awards Reaction

Post-Academy Awards Reaction

Some critics accused the Academy of homophobia for failing to award the Oscar for Best Picture to Brokeback Mountain and instead giving it to a rival nominee, Crash:

• Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: "In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who've led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed Brokeback Mountain."
• Nikki Finke, Los Angeles Weekly: "I knew there was a chance that, even without seeing the movie, Oscar voters could feel guilt-tripped or succumb to a herd mentality to vote for the "gay-cowboy" movie and strike a blow against Republican wedge politics and extremist religious hatemongering. But they didn't, and Brokeback lost for all the Right's reasons."
• Peter Howell, Toronto Star: "Sunday's selection of Crash over Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture was the first time in memory that fear seemed to be the guiding impulse for awarding Oscar's top prize. Faced with the choice between a feel-good movie about the evils of racism and a troublesome film that challenged prejudices about homosexual love, Academy voters grabbed their security blankets and started sucking on their thumbs."

Author Annie Proulx has also blamed right-wing influences for the film's failure to win Best Picture:

"The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy Awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit Awards. We should have known conservative heffalump Academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the Academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - "Crash" a few weeks before the ballot deadline. 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."

The writer has also pondered whether Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance, though "brilliant", involved the easier acting skill of "mimicry" (by implication, unlike Heath Ledger's Oscar-nominated Brokeback Mountain performance, in which he invented the clenched-jaw and mannerisms of "Ennis Del Mar").

Supporting the charge of homophobia were media reports that some members of the Academy were so opposed to the subject matter of the film that they refused to even view Brokeback Mountain before voting.

Other critics, however, pointed out that the charge of homophobia is an easy one to make, and that it was equally as likely that the Academy simply thought Crash to be a better film.

The Ultimate Brokeback Forum, a web forum of several thousand members, self-financed and designed a grass roots, full page ad in the May 10, 2006 issue of Daily Variety, thanking the creators of Brokeback Mountain, listing all of the significant Best Picture Awards the film received. This particular issue of Daily Variety was covered by such news organizations as The New York Times, Newsweek, and the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph.