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Ang Lee earns best-director Oscar
(AP/Reuters)
Updated: 2006-03-06 12:50 "Brokeback" too controversial after all
LOS ANGELES -
Maybe a gay cowboy picture was too controversial after all, or at least that is
what the legendary Western writer who adapted "Brokeback Mountain" for the
screen thinks.
"Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don't want
cowboys to be gay," said Larry McMurtry, 69 who has spent his career challenging
the stereotypes of the West -- and generally won.
McMurtry won the Oscar
for best adapted screenplay with his partner Diana Ossana, but their film lost
the prize for best picture to "Crash", a drama about urban racism.
The
quirky Texan who is building one of the largest used book store complexes in the
world in a rural town in his home Lone Star state wore jeans along with a tuxedo
jacket to the Academy Awards.
"I always wear jeans," he explained.
McMurtry has had critical and commercial success exploring the gritty
real-life West in a series of iconic works such as Pulitzer Prize-winning
"Lonesome Dove," an epic tale of cowboys on a cattle drive.
"I'm a
critic of the myth of the cowboy," he told the New York Times in 1988. "People
need to believe that cowboys are simple, strong and free, and not twisted,
fascistic and dumb, as many cowboys I've known have been," he added at the time.
"Brokeback" is based on a short story by Annie Proulx which follows the
lives of two cowboys who fall in love as young men one summer herding sheep on
Brokeback Mountain.
"It's the same West," as "Lonesome Dove", he said on the
red carpet going into the festivities. "Always a lot of loneliness in the West."
McMurtry's writing partner Ossana, who also produced the film with James
Schamus, called the night "bittersweet".
McMurtry said voters had
rejected his own rural-themed movies, which include "Brokeback Mountain" and
"Last Picture Show," and "Texasville" but gave the more urban-themed "Terms of
Endearment" an Oscar.
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