Best Picture

I don't have a hunch about what film will win the Oscar this year, but I have never witnessed in all my days media exert itself so much to declare Broke Back Mountain as irrelevent to society and anathama to American values. CNN's Friday piece about film choices of theater owners in Kansas is just one example. At one point they asked three old crones about what kind of movies they would want to see, and they lamented Holloywood doesn't make movies like Sound of Music anymore. I know I had heard this someplace before. This today from James Wolcott


"Think of the movies now considered classic (or semi-classic) from the great grunge stretch of the late Sixties and Seventies, movies such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, Blazing Saddles, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, on and on--do these movies speak to the pieties and platitudes that William Bennett holds dear? Even back then during all the noise and excitement I remember sweet old ladies wondering why they didn't make nice movies like The Sound of Music anymore, and they're still asking that same question today. It may be the same old ladies, having gone through two generations of floral muu-muus. Get over it, grandma! They're not going to make movies like Sound of Music anymore, they barely made them back then."

(Thanks to FireDogLake)

There is a whole genre of closeted homoerotic westerns in literature starting with the Virginian and old western movies in the 50's (see Audie Murphy). Broke Back is just out of the closet, that's all.

I hope they win.