You're entitled to your own opinion. Just make sure it's the right one.
Oh please.
As Hugh Laurie once wrote, Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. Laurie made this observation in the middle of a scene in his comic (and utterly marvellous) novel The Gun Seller, in which the narrator is trying to hit on a woman having just nearly killed an assailant in her front room. She tells him to "drop that shit right now. There's a man dying in here." Laurie's narrator observes to himself that implied in that statement is the notion that had there not been a man dying in there, he could have "kept holding onto that shit" and continued chatting up the woman.
Likewise, every time someone like Ang Lee or any of those people quoted in the article linked above complains that Brokeback Mountain only lost because it was a movie about gay cowboys and America wasn't ready to embrace the pink, their statements carry the implication that it should have won because it was a movie about gay cowboys, as though that were reason enough to award a film Best Picture.
It's the same asininity that beset Joss Whedon when he killed Tara in the Buffy episode Seeing Red. Mutant Enemy was inundated with complaints that by killing a lesbian character and sending her lover on a grief-stricken kill-crazy rampage Whedon had fulfilled the poisonous Dead/Evil Lesbian Cliché that has apparently permeated movies for decades. Whedon simply pointed out that Tara's death was merely a function of the story arc that started four years earlier with Willow's spell in Becoming, Part II: Willow's ever-growing power and her ability to control it. Viewed entirely dispassionately, Tara needed to die to bring Willow's ability to control her powers to a head. For Whedon to have held off killing her simply because she was a lesbian was just as offensive to him as killing her simply because she was a lesbian. In the end he had to ignore her sexuality and deal with her entirely independently of it. (Of course, this is what the gay community is supposed to have been after since forever.) Complaints that he had killed off half of the only lesbian couple on primetime TV were likewise refuted with the eminently sensible comment that that was hardly his fault: he couldn't write all the shows.
So everyone thought Brokeback was going to win and it didn't. It's not the first time that different films have won Best Director and Best Picture. Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love are but the most recent films to have shared the top two awards, if memory serves. I don't think anyone felt Ryan was cheated of Best Picture because it was just too anti-war (Hollywood being as full of anti-war types as it is of gay people). You can't predict how 7,000 people are going to vote and you can't second-guess their reasons for voting how they did when you find out.
As Hugh Laurie once wrote, Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. Laurie made this observation in the middle of a scene in his comic (and utterly marvellous) novel The Gun Seller, in which the narrator is trying to hit on a woman having just nearly killed an assailant in her front room. She tells him to "drop that shit right now. There's a man dying in here." Laurie's narrator observes to himself that implied in that statement is the notion that had there not been a man dying in there, he could have "kept holding onto that shit" and continued chatting up the woman.
Likewise, every time someone like Ang Lee or any of those people quoted in the article linked above complains that Brokeback Mountain only lost because it was a movie about gay cowboys and America wasn't ready to embrace the pink, their statements carry the implication that it should have won because it was a movie about gay cowboys, as though that were reason enough to award a film Best Picture.
It's the same asininity that beset Joss Whedon when he killed Tara in the Buffy episode Seeing Red. Mutant Enemy was inundated with complaints that by killing a lesbian character and sending her lover on a grief-stricken kill-crazy rampage Whedon had fulfilled the poisonous Dead/Evil Lesbian Cliché that has apparently permeated movies for decades. Whedon simply pointed out that Tara's death was merely a function of the story arc that started four years earlier with Willow's spell in Becoming, Part II: Willow's ever-growing power and her ability to control it. Viewed entirely dispassionately, Tara needed to die to bring Willow's ability to control her powers to a head. For Whedon to have held off killing her simply because she was a lesbian was just as offensive to him as killing her simply because she was a lesbian. In the end he had to ignore her sexuality and deal with her entirely independently of it. (Of course, this is what the gay community is supposed to have been after since forever.) Complaints that he had killed off half of the only lesbian couple on primetime TV were likewise refuted with the eminently sensible comment that that was hardly his fault: he couldn't write all the shows.
So everyone thought Brokeback was going to win and it didn't. It's not the first time that different films have won Best Director and Best Picture. Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love are but the most recent films to have shared the top two awards, if memory serves. I don't think anyone felt Ryan was cheated of Best Picture because it was just too anti-war (Hollywood being as full of anti-war types as it is of gay people). You can't predict how 7,000 people are going to vote and you can't second-guess their reasons for voting how they did when you find out.
posted by Novus at 14:08
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