Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm proud to present this year's official artwork for our Oscar Night along with our program's lead article by Michael Flanagan.http://baycityforums.com/BBM/oscar_night.htm__________________________________________________________________________________
Yet each man kills the things he loves
By each let this be heard
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword
Some kill their love when they are young
And some when they are old
Some strangle with the hands of Lust
Some with the hands of Gold
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold When Oscar Wilde wrote ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ while imprisoned in Reading Prison for gross indecency in 1897 he could easily have been describing the world of Ennis Del Mar in ‘Brokeback Mountain’. Who hasn’t found themselves looking back at a world that could have been, only to say those saddest of words ‘if only’?
Oscar himself would become the posthumous victim of Lord Alfred Douglas (affectionately known to Wilde as ‘Boise'). Douglas would call Wilde "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last three hundred and fifty years." Unlike Ennis Del Mar’s feelings toward Jack Twist, Douglas would later say that he intensely regretted having met Wilde.
Had Wilde been prescient he probably would have regretted ever having met Douglas. Wilde (with Douglas’ encouragement) brought suit for libel against Douglas’ father who had called him a sodomite. In court Wilde denied that there was any substance to the allegations - and found himself on trial when several young men were brought to the stand to testify otherwise.
Have we come very far from the world Oscar lived in? In 2006 we found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wanted to disassociate themselves from the powerful indictment of homophobia that existed in ‘Brokeback Mountain’ - choosing instead to celebrate ‘Crash’ as the best picture of the year - a film which posits that everyone is racist. So instead of celebrating a film which argues for compassion we found the Academy casting its vote with those who would say that bigotry is part of the human condition. This snub came after a season of vile commentary - from reviewers like Gene Shalit, who called the character of Jack Twist a rapist; from Jack Cafferty on CNN who said ‘there aren't too many closet doors that are left closed in this country’ and from Tony Curtis who told Fox News that he hadn’t see it and that John Wayne wouldn’t like it. Surely these views on homosexuality fit right in to the 19th century world of Oscar Wilde.
We find ourselves in 2007 living in a world where a film about homosexuality has never won a ‘best picture’ award. Of course this has been true for a while, ‘The Color Purple’ lost out to ‘Out of Africa’ in 1986 and ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ lost to ‘Forrest Gump’ in 1995. And yet a film about a transvestite serial killer has won (‘Silence of the Lambs’ in 1992) and a film about a schizophrenic man whose homosexual encounters have been conveniently excised from his story has won (‘A Beautiful Mind’ in 2002). Actors and actresses have won for gay roles, of course - Tom Hanks for ‘Philadelphia’ and Philip Seymour Hoffman for ‘Capote’. So to take a broad view the Academy appears to be telling us that if you want to be successful in a gay film you should be dead or obvious - but don’t scare the horses by appearing to be an everyday person, please. Clearly these are views that would make perfect sense to Oscar - thinking like this made him deny his own homosexuality in court.
Gay people and their friends have been fans of the Academy Awards for a long time. It just appears that the feeling isn’t reciprocated. So perhaps it is time for us to kill the thing we loved and move on. We don’t need their Oscar - we have our own. And in his ‘De Profundis’ he says:
“. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.”
Can there be any question that he would understand the world of Ennis Del Mar?
Michael Flanagan, San Francisco
