“Brokeback Mountain‘s” Oscar-winning co-writer Diana Ossana recently marked the film’s 20th anniversary with an interview in The New York Times, in which she revealed the exact moment she realized Ang Lee’s acclaimed romance film would not win the Oscar for best picture despite being the far-and-away frontrunner of the 2005-2006 awards season.
As recounted by The Times: “Weeks before the ceremony, after Oscar voting was closed, she attended a party for the nominees at the home of Paul Haggis, the director of ‘Crash.’ Clint Eastwood was in attendance and Ossana, a fan of ‘Unforgiven,’ was eager to meet him.”
“Paul started walking me over and he goes, ‘Diana, I have to tell you, he hasn’t seen your movie.’ And it was like somebody kicked me in the stomach,” Ossanna recalled. “That’s when I knew we would not win best picture.”
“Brokeback Mountain” infamously lost best picture to “Crash” on Oscar night, despite winning the most best film prizes of awards season beforehand (including at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs). Ossanna said homophobia was to blame, adding: “People want to deny that, but what else could it have been? We’d won everything up until then.”
Several members of the Academy’s acting branch publicly opposed “Brokeback Mountain,” most notably Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis. The performers said they would not watch “Brokeback,” with Curtis saying in an interview that contemporaries like “Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn’t like it” and “this picture is not as important as we make it. It’s nothing unique. The only thing unique about it is they put it on the screen. And they make ’em [gay] cowboys.”
Ossana told The Times that she traveled to theaters in Missouri, South Dakota and Colorado when “Brokeback Mountain” opened nationwide to see how audiences would react to the movie.
“The theaters 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” was recently re-released in theaters by Focus Features to commemorate its 20th anniversary.
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