Brokeback Mountain co-writer Diana Ossana has said she knew the film wouldn’t win Best Picture at the Oscars after an interaction with Clint Eastwood.
The 2005 groundbreaking film, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two cowboys who develop a romantic relationship, famously lost out at that year’s Oscars ceremony to Paul Haggis’s 2004 film Crash, despite being a frontrunner for that year’s awards season.
Speaking to The New York Times, Ossana explained that she was attending a party for Academy Award nominations after voting had ended, when Crash director Haggis informed her that Eastwood hadn’t seen Brokeback Mountain.
“Paul started walking me over and he goes, ‘Diana, I have to tell you, he hasn’t seen your movie,'” recalled Ossana. “And it was like somebody kicked me in the stomach. That’s when I knew we would not win Best Picture.”
Brokeback Mountain was still a success, winning best film prizes at awards season events, such as the Golden Globes and Baftas. At the Oscars, it won Best Adapted Screenplay for Ossana and Larry McMurtry, Best Director for Ang Lee and Best Original Score for Gustavo Santaolalla.
Ossana said she is still convinced that homophobia in Hollywood played a part in Best Picture loss.
“People want to deny that, but what else could it have been? We’d won everything up until then,” she said.
At the time, Academy voters such as Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis publicly stated they would not watch the film.
“I absolutely think that block of voters kept this movie from winning Best Picture,” said Ossana.
Ossana said she travelled to cinemas in Missouri, South Dakota and Colorado when Brokeback Mountain opened to see how audiences reacted to the movie.
“The theatres were all packed because everybody was so curious about this movie,” she said. “And when the sex scene between the boys came on, you’d see some people got up and left, but not very many. At the end of the film, nobody would leave. They would just sit there nailed to their seats until the lights came on, and there would be people crying.”
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee said in a recent interview that he was still puzzled by how the film was received at the Oscars.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he told Deadline last month.
“There are times when I feel like there’s an unlimited willingness to watch the movie. There’s so much love for it. Generally, you feel like it’s a breakthrough, that it broke all barriers. People seem to melt down. And you cannot even define it as gay cinema. It’s not gay cinema, right? It’s a love story.”
Other nominees in the Best Picture category included George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck – a play adaptation of which has just premiered on Broadway – Capote, starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
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