‘Brokeback’ has the Oscar momentum

Could ‘Capote’ be the spoiler come Oscar time?
If anything can halt the “Brokeback Mountain” express at the Oscars, “Capote” might be it. Nominated for only one Globe (which it won), it was named the year’s best film by the National Society of Film Critics, which seemed to go out of its way to ignore “Brokeback” in every category — perhaps the first sign of a “Brokeback” backlash.

Also not to be discounted are “Crash,” which unexpectedly has earned nominations from all the Hollywood guilds, and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which won the National Board of Review’s prize for best picture and scored with all of the guilds. The Kansas City and Washington D.C. critics picked Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” as the year’s best, but among the guilds, it was mentioned only by the Directors Guild.

Following a near-sweep of year-end critics’ awards for best picture, “Brokeback” has exceeded box-office expectations for a gay film. Still in relatively limited release, it crossed over the $30 million mark in the United States this weekend, while pushing “King Kong” out of the No. 1 spot in the United Kingdom. Despite being pulled from one Utah megaplex, it’s selling out at a nearby Salt Lake City theater.

ROBYN BECK / AFP/Getty Images Philip Seymour Hoffman poses with his Golden Globe award for best actor for the film "Capote."

According to Variety, it’s also doing surprisingly well in such cities as Nashville, San Antonio and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s been in release for more than a month, yet on a per-theater basis, it’s doing better than the weekend’s new releases, “Hoodwinked,” “Glory Road” and “Last Holiday.”

The film’s unexpected appeal to heartland moviegoers has generated plenty of commentary, most recently from The New York Times’ Caryn James, who suggests that the two-decades-long secret affair between Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) is essentially a backstreet soap opera with great appeal to women.

“They are as truly in love as two people can be,” writes The New Republic’s longtime movie critic, Stanley Kauffmann. He sees the picture as a witness to “the delicacy and pain and almost unbearable joy of the pair.”

The Nation’s pop-culture writer, Richard Goldstein, even argues that it has fans in unlikely places. He claims the Christian right has been muted in its objections to “Brokeback” because the movie “echoes the fashionable fundamentalist idea that disapproving dads make deviant sons. . . both Jack and Ennis had brutal, distant fathers.”

Some critics and Oscar predictors can’t see “Brokeback” sweeping the Oscars, because even such past gay winners as “Philadelphia” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” collected awards only for their actors.

Yet 36 years ago, in a nation deeply divided by war and politics and the beginnings of the gay-rights movement, “Midnight Cowboy” — an X-rated story of two men who rely entirely on each other for emotional support — won the Oscar for best picture. And it even had a Western reference in the title.

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