Annie Proulx, author of the short story that Larry McMurty adapted for the screen, whines:
The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture [...] 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.
What’s the alternative to having some arbitrary group of self-appointed elites decide which films are good? It seems to me it would be to throw the judging wide open to the American filmgoer. The only problem here for Proulx, is that the public votes with its wallet, and it apparently preferred the latest George Lucas excrescence to anything else.
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Heffalumps? I’ve always pictured the LA crowd being more akin to woozles. Matter of persepctive I guess.
On the inside, they’re like those slime-creatures that chased the wizard Howl in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Which is an excellent movie, btw.
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[...] Annie Proulx complains because Hollywood is a notoriously right-wing pit of Bush-loving neo-cons, and no one there has ever met a gay person. [...]