Oscar Disappointment

Last week I was rarin' to go. I decided that I was going to see all the Best Picture nominees before the Oscars. I thought I was doing OK: Walk the Line seemed a likely nominee, and definitely Brokeback Mountain (saw it Saturday night), and Pride and Prejudice was a longshot, but possible, and those are the three movies I've seen in the movie theater in the last several months. Then Crash won at the SAG Awards, and I've seen that too! (Though it is so not a Best Picture, in my humble opinion.) (Which is shared by my favorite movie critic who also put Pride and Prejudice as his #1 movie for 2005.) I thought Capote was pretty likely, and I wanted to see that too.

The the nominations came out. Can I just say ugh and ugh and ugh--hey wait, I just checked the list, and I read it wrong. I thought it was Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Munich, Goodnight and Good Luck, and Syriana, but it's Capote, not Syriana, so really there's only one movie that I just don't want to see, and that's Munich. Goodnight and Good Luck (which I keep writing as Goodbye and Goodnight) does not really interest me, but enough people have said it's good that I suppose I can see it. And I'm excited to see Capote, though I hope it's still playing (just checked--two theaters in the Greater East Coast Big City area).

If only K and I were one person, because she has seen Crash, Munich, Syriana, and Goodnight and Good Luck, but that probably explains why we're not one person (i.e. she is married to D and reads books by women writers from oppressed countries, while I am married to S and read chick lit) (actually, I have completely forsworn chick lit because it is all so bad these days; I read contemporary women's literary realism, which of course she does too, so maybe we are one person).

So if you're wondering what I thought about Brokeback Mountain, here are some thoughts, in random order:

- It was beautiful, all those mountains and such.

- It was too beautiful: Ang Lee frames every shot so carefully that I couldn't stop thinking that here was another shot framed by Ang Lee, rather than just falling into the movie.

- It was extremely faithful to the story, and having read the story, this made it a little bloodless for me. It also reminded me of Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility which is probably the most faithful Jane Austen adaptation out there (and I have seen most of the Jane Austen adaptations out there). The thing is, I like film adaptations to do something to the story, not mess with it, but add to my understanding of it. Which is why I quite liked the new Pride and Prejudice, though it made the purists nuts. Sure it was explicit when Austen is all about implicit, and there are no pigs in the novel, but it made the characters into real, living, breathing people, and that was cool. S, on the other hand, had not read the story (Brokeback Mountain, not Pride and Prejudice, which he did not see and probably has not read). He found the movie completely gripping, narratively and emotionally.

- The acting was excellent.

- As S said, the gay cowboy thing really did seem secondary to the pain of love thing (which is basically what Anthony Lane says too).

- I couldn't help but wonder whether the sheep were real or digital (this is the kind of thing I never wondered until Titanic, and I'm always too visually inept to tell).

- It was a very good movie, but it was too...perfect? neat? careful? for me to consider it a great movie. Still, it was definitely better than Crash. Now I have to go see the others.