March 13, 2006
Annie Proulx’s very bad night
So, you write a short story about a couple sheep herders learning about love in the mountains. It's published. They make a movie of it.
That's the first surprise.
It's Hollywood, so the movie shouldn't be very good. Odds are, you know? But it's not. It's very good.
That's the second surprise.
It's so good, it's nominated for best picture. The director: nominated. The screenplay: nominated. And so on. Eight in all.
That's the third surprise.
It doesn't win best picture, but the director and screenwriters win.
So, the writer who wrote the story that was made into the movie, a pretty good movie, a film so good it won Oscars, should be feeling pretty much on top of the world now, right?
Wrong!
We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And 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.Surprised?
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