Go, uh, Left, Young Men     2/4/2006
By Robert Knight

Hollywood salutes the sexually perverse and politically correct in Oscar nominations.

This column was published on February 3, 2006, in WorldNetDaily.com.

It’s enough to make John Wayne come back and … wait a minute, Pilgrim. They’re only sheepherders, not cowboys. Keep your shirt on – please.

Okay, so Brokeback Mountain, the Wyoming sheepherder epic filmed in politically correct Canada (a tad less so since the election), galloped away with, count ’em, eight Oscar nominations, including all the biggies.

Anyone acting even a bit surprised should get an Academy Award.

It wasn’t just Brokeback. Another film, Capote, about the late homosexual writer Truman Capote, garnered five major nominations – Best Picture, Director (Bennett Miller), Actor (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener) and Adapted Screenplay.

Transamerica, the story of a man who thinks he’s a woman, managed to get one major nomination – Best Actress (Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives, who plays the guy in the dress), plus Original Song (“Travelin’ Thru”).

By contrast, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the C.S. Lewis classic, was shut out of the major categories.

All in all, with a few exceptions, including a Best Animated Feature nomination for Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Hollywood continued its tradition of rewarding largely left-wing projects, actors and directors, particularly those with a lavender hue.

To be fair, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which just crossed the $100 million mark at the box office, did well, snagging nominations for Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix) Actress (Reese Witherspoon), Editing, Costume Design, and Sound Mixing. One wonders how the film would have fared had it not virtually ignored the immense role that Christianity played in Cash’s life-saving turnaround. But let’s not quibble. At least they didn’t make Cash out to be a fey hustler at some point in his life.

The hyper-hyped film of the year, Brokeback received nominations for Best Picture, Director (Ang Lee), Actor (Heath Ledger), Supporting Actor (Jake Gyllenhaal), Supporting Actress (Michelle Williams), Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, and Music. What a rip-off. With all the buzz, it should have gotten at least 13 or 14.

Brokeback was billed in some newspaper ads as “a good old-fashioned love story,” which should have triggered an advertising fraud inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission.

Whatever its merits, this flick is not an “old-fashioned love story,” in which, as most people understand it, the guy meets the girl, sparks fly, he marries her, and they live happily ever after. The hero in such a flick does not – and this apparently bears repeating – does not lust after his good buddy. Not even a sly glance. That would get him a rather rude response, not a slew of Oscar nominations. More

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