IGF CultureWatch

Gregory King has penned in Bay Windows an excellent analysis of Brokeback Mountain's defeat (we hope to post a fuller version soon). King explains the significance of a Best Picture win, which can "generate tens of millions in additional revenue...while also serving as a green-light for films with similar themes in the future." And he explains:

The defeat of Brokeback Mountain was a serious blow, one that suggests that Hollywood feels unable to endorse a gay love story with its highest honor, even if it means overturning years of Oscar precedent to do so.

What precedent, you ask? King relates (and I didn't know this):

No film in history that has won the best picture award from both the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Association has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. No film that has won the producers', directors' and writers' guild awards has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. No film that has won the Golden Globe, the directors' guild award and led in Oscar nominations, has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain.

And he adds, "Make no mistake, the motion picture academy used a tire iron on Brokeback Mountain Sunday night.

And there's this sad fact:

Others report widespread distaste for Brokeback among the academy's older members, a distaste expressed by Tony Curtis, who told Fox News that he would not even see the film before voting against it. The New York Times on Monday quoted an attendee at an Oscar party who noted, without irony, that older academy voters opposed Brokeback Mountain because it "diminished" cowboys as iconic figures in movies.

King quotes LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who wrote:

In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who've led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed Brokeback Mountain.

We still have a very long way to go, and Hollywood hypocrites, smugly congratulating themselves for being so very, very special, aren't helping.

More. The Washington Blade's Nevin Naff shows why Crash-derivative, recycled, contrived and overstated-wasn't the year's best.

Still more!!! Brokeback author Annie Proulx, writing in the Guardian: "Rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the Academy voters with DVD copies of 'Trash'-excuse me-'Crash' a few weeks before the ballot deadline."

Poor Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich. You try to pander to the racial grievance crowd while portraying yourself as a champion of diversity, and some people won't give you a break!

Blagojevich finds himself at the center of a controversy over his August appointment of Nation of Islam official "Sister" Claudette Marie Muhammad to serve on his Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. Muhammad invited fellow commissioners to broaden their perspectives by joining her at a Feb. 26 speech given by National of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who, incidentally, is well know for his disparaging remarks about Jews, whites and gays. At the speech, Farrakhan was in characteristic form, hitting the trifecta with references to "Hollywood Jews" promoting homosexuality and "other filth." Four members of the commission resigned last week rather than serve with Muhammad.

Standing her ground, Muhammad (who serves as Farrakhan's chief of protocol) says, "For those who try to condemn me because of the honorable Louis Farrakhan's remarks on Saviours' Day, which were perceived by some as anti-Semitic, it's ridiculous." Apparently, Farrakhan wasn't condemning all Hollywood Jews-get it?

For his part, Blagojevich has condemned Farrakhan's remarks as "deplorable, hateful, wrong and harmful," but says he won't take any action against Farrakhan's loyal defender on his own bias commission because that would be "guilt by association," and no doubt reckoning the number of upset blacks vs. gays and Jews in his re-election calculus.

"Crash" is a film panoramic of racism in LA including the entertainment industry, with some good performances, yet hardly groundbreaking in content or style. But that's show biz. At least "Brokeback Mountain" came out with three awards, including adapted screenplay and director, with moving speeches by director Ang Lee and scripters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. I'm also glad Annie Proulx was there to share in the acclaim.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's impression of Truman Capote was, sorry to say, way down on my list (I'd have certainly gone with either Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix). And whereas Reese Witherspoon appropriately paid homage to Johnny and June Cash in her best actress speech, Hoffman (as at the Golden Globes) could find not one word to say about the brilliant but tortured gay man whose life he rode to Oscar gold. Really, I'm quite disgusted by him.

George Clooney was more than a bit condescending in his defense of Hollywood's being "out of touch" with America (because tinsel town, it seems, exists on a higher moral plane). That's the attitude that plays well in the blue states but ensures liberals won't be making inroads in the red states.

Jon Stewart, by the way, was a lot better than I had expected. Not exactly exciting , but occasionally clever and not (like Whoopi Goldberg) politically insufferable.

More. Reader "Jessup" writes:

Crash was the safe liberal choice-guilty Hollywood navel-gazing about how racist they all are in LA and in "the industry." Few people bothered to see it.

Brokeback is a modern classic.

...Steve was right; Hollywood is homophobic, and as he said before, they only like their queers when they have plenty of "swish." Absolutely. Steve don't be afraid to speak the truth!

Thanks for saying it for me.

Still more. Tom Shales writes in the Washington Post:

Film buffs and the politically minded, meanwhile, will be arguing this morning about wither the Best Picture Oscar to "Crash" was really for the film's merit or just a copout by the Motion Picture Academy so it wouldn't have to give the prize to "Brokeback Mountain," a movie about two cowboys who fall reluctantly but passionately in love."

"Mountain" won the major awards leading up to Best Picture....But the Academy ran out of love for the film at that point, making "Crash" the suprise winner.

And here's Charles Krauthammer's comment about "Syriana," which seems applicable to "Crash" as well:

[Y]ou have no idea how self-flagellation and self-loathing pass for complexity and moral seriousness in Hollywood.

That about sums it up.

Ye gads, still more. Blogger Tim Hulsey shares his thoughts.

What strikes me about this nasty National Review poke at "Brokeback" is just how lame it is. When it comes to hate humor, the hard right is even less funny than the hard left.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that Congress was within its authority to withhold federal funding from law schools that discriminate against military recruiters. That's a stunning defeat for a case brought by "progressive" law professors backed by some gay student groups and other LGBT activists, all of whom thought private institutions could demand government funding without suffering government restrictions. (The gist of the matter was, superficially, that the military discriminates against gays; the more pertinent matter was liberal academia's hostility toward all things military.)

Not only was this fight terrible PR for the cause of gays in the military (aligning the gay struggle with a hodge-podge of leftie military haters), but even the most liberal Justices found the argument without merit. In fact, if the anti-militarists had prevailed, it would have called into question the government's ability to insist that (as of now) those that receive federal funding don't discriminate based on race, and (let's hope in the future) that they don't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

Sometimes, you have to wonder what "progressives" are thinking (giving them the benefit of the doubt that they're thinking at all).

More. I've revised the above to clarify that left-leaning law professors brought the actual suit. Here, George Will opines on how "The institutional vanity and intellectual slovenliness of America's campus-based intelligentsia have made academia more peripheral to civic life than at any time since the 19th century."

After a number of years in which lesbians simultaneously held the top leadership spots in the major lesbigay+trans organizations, including HRC, NGLTF, GLAAD, and PFLAG, these groups now all have gay men at the helm, reports the Washington Blade.

That's really not surprising. In the pre-AIDS years, men led most of the emerging gay rights groups while women gravitated to feminist/lesbian rights efforts. AIDS changed everything, and women came to the "LGBT" forefront.

But as Paul Varnell noted in this column, surveys repeatedly show gay men outnumbering lesbians about two to one. For starters, in the 1950s Kinsey's often misinterpreted figures actually showed 4 percent of the surveyed men were exclusively homosexual vs. between 1% to 2% of women. In 1993, a team at the Harvard School of Public Health noted 6.2% of men and 3.6% of women reported a same-sex partner in the pervious five years.

And in 1994 a large National Opinion Research Center study found 9% of men and 4% of women engaged in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty; that 6.2% of men and 4.4% of women reported any same-sex attraction; and that 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women acknowledged a homosexual or bisexual identity.

So, despite differing methodologies (none without critics) and over the decades, these ratios seem to hold up. As Varnell concludes:

The statistics may never be as firm as we'd like, but by this point it's hard to deny a striking fact about sexual preference: Gay men outnumber gay women, by an apparently substantial margin.

Women will again take charge of many LGBT organizations as they cycle through leaders, but it shouldn't be unexpected that gay men, after such a dearth, now predominate. Unlike in the population at large, demanding equal representation between gay men and lesbians turns out not to be equitable at all.
--Stpehen H. Miller

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02/26/06 - 03/05/06

Love her or hate her, feisty cultural critic Camille Paglia (an out but never PC lesbian) is always provocative. She'll be commenting on the Oscars real-time over at Salon, here.

She's got to be better than watching the insufferable Jon Stewart.

Update. See item above for a reconsideration of Stewart. As for Camille's commentary with Cintra Wilson, it was rather catty and less than riveting, alas.

Looks to me like media pickup of this story, accusing Brokeback Mountain's filmmakers of imperiling sheep and other critters, just as Oscar voting reached its crescendo, smacks of dirty politics in Hollywoodland. It's reminiscent of how the LA Times held its story on Schwarzenegger's derriere-pinching until the eve of the Calif. gubernatorial election, or how the tale of Bush's youthful DIU was released just as his race with Gore drew to a close.

And just watch the LGBT "two-feet-bad/four-feet-good" crowd scurrying onboard. Talk about sheep!

More. Not to beat a dead sheep, but the religious rightists have now picked up the story.

The Ex-Gay Watch site notes that it has received a cease-and-desist order from Liberty Counsel, "a religious-right legal assault team based at Jerry Falwell's fundamentalist Liberty University," for showing a parody of an Exodus billboard (here's the original, here's the parody by Justinsomnia).

The fundamentalist dream: no gays, and no free speech. And alas, in this disdain for expression they find objectionable, they reflect their mirror opposites in the speech-code obsessed, politically correct left.

On a brigher note, the NY Times considers the meaning of Brokeback parodies, such as those avaiilable here. No word on any suits.

Jon Rauch (who, among other things, is IGF's co-managing editor), dissects Stanley Kurtz's misuse of data to claim that same-sex marriage undermined traditional marriages in the Netherlands, leading to an increase in out-of-wedlock births. It gets technical, but you can read Jon's analysis first here, then a follow-up here, and a final retort here.

But the rank distortion on Kurtz's part really isn't surprising. As one of the comments to Jon's posting puts it, "The arguments against same-sex couples marrying legally are not based on reason or on data. When you have faith, anything will do to feed it."

IGF contributing author Jamie Kirchick writes in the Yale Daily News about his university's glee at landing the former Taliban spokesperson as a student. Comments Kirchick:

Don't expect a word of protest from our feminist and gay groups, who now have in their midst a live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever. They're busy hunting bogeymen like frat parties and single-sex bathrooms. The answer Hashemi gave five years ago when asked about the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, "American women don't have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus," is the sort of sophistry likely to curry favor among Yale's feminist activists, who make every effort to paint American society as chauvinistic while refraining from criticizing non-Western cultures. To do so would be "cultural imperialism," and we cannot have that at an enlightened place like Yale.

I personally want to know whether Hashemi supports the flattening of homosexuals via brick walls, which was one of the ways the Taliban dealt with gay men.

And so it goes at Yale, Harvard, and the other bastions of elite progressivism, dedicating to training the next generation of would-be apparatchiks and fascism-appeasers.

More. Critics have noted that Yale won't allow ROTC or even military recruiters on campus, but welcome a Taliban spokesperson into their community.
--Stephen H. Miller