I was, and still am, firmly in the Munich/Spielberg camp. Great year overall.
1. The New World (Terrence Malick)
2. Munich (Steven Spielberg)
3. The Best of Youth (Marco Tullio Giordana)
4. The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard)
5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones)
6. Cache (Michael Haneke)
7. Millions (Danny Boyle)
8. The White Diamond (Werner Herzog)
9. Murderball (Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro)
10. Kings and Queen (Arnaud Depleschin)
Runners-Up: Downfall (Olivier Hirschbigel); Keane (Lodge Kerrigan); Lackawanna Blues (George C. Wolfe); Land of the Dead (George Romero); Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck); The Squid and the Whale (Noah Bambauch)
Best Picture and Director 2005
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nightwingnova
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005
Crash was pretentious, contrived. Just vile.
Capote was solid, as was Munich, though I rate the latter slightly lower because of its looseness with fact.
For me, though Brokeback Mountain does not have the poetic lyricism that the short story it is based on does, Ang Lee and his achievement is my choice.
Capote was solid, as was Munich, though I rate the latter slightly lower because of its looseness with fact.
For me, though Brokeback Mountain does not have the poetic lyricism that the short story it is based on does, Ang Lee and his achievement is my choice.
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Big Magilla
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Best Picture and Director 2005
Crash may not have been the worst film to win a Best Picture Oscar, but it was certainly a curious one. A small budget film that was shown at the 2004 Toronto Film Festival but not picked up for distribution until 2005, it was a look at intersecting lives in L.A. that owed much to Magnolia, 21 Grams and Short Cuts, films that got there first and did it better. It also owed a lot thematically to Do the Right Thing in its ironic depiction of racial strife and tension. Aside from several good performances, though, it all seemed more earnest than profound, at least to me. Did voters really, really like it or did they just hate the idea of giving the award to a film about "gay cowboys"?
Brokeback Mountain's protagonists may have been gay and may have been cowboys, but what the film really was about was misery and regret, which it put across more profoundly than any American film within memory. Having won the preponderance of precursors, the film was the obvious front-runner despite the protests of some of the Academy's old geezers. Its loss seemed to shock everyone including Jack Nicolson who made the Best Picture presentation. The tip-off may have been the SAG ensemble award which went to Crash even if it seemed that they were really honoring the film with the most actors as opposed to the best acted ensemble. Maybe it was partly that. Maybe it was a revolt against the idea of "outsiders" all but dictating what the Academy should do. Maybe they really did like Ang Lee's direction better than the film itself. Whatever the reason, 2005 is likely to always be looked at as the year Brokeback Mountain lost, rather than Crash won.
Next to Brokeback Mountain, the year's best film had to be David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which shockingly received only two Oscar nominations - one for Best Adapted Screenplay and one for Best Supporting Actor for William Hurt whose performance was hardly the best in the film. The best nominated film, after Brokeback Mountain, had to be George Clooney's nostalgic Good Night, and Good Luck. Bennett Miller's Capote and Steven Spielberg's Munich were good films that placed sixth and seventh on my ten best list for the year, but I preferred Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener and Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale for those slots.
Paul Haggis is a decent writer as he has proved with his Oscar nominated screenplay for 2004's Million Dollar Baby and his subsequent win for 2006's Letters from Iwo Jima, but not with his Oscar winning screenplay here. Good Night, and Good Luck and The Squid and the Whale were more deserving of wins in this year's Original Screenplay category. As a director, I thought he did a better job with 2007's In the Valley of Elah than here. Only the non-nominated David Cronenberg really comes close to Ang Lee's mastery this year.
My votes go to Brokeback Mountain and Ang Lee.
Brokeback Mountain's protagonists may have been gay and may have been cowboys, but what the film really was about was misery and regret, which it put across more profoundly than any American film within memory. Having won the preponderance of precursors, the film was the obvious front-runner despite the protests of some of the Academy's old geezers. Its loss seemed to shock everyone including Jack Nicolson who made the Best Picture presentation. The tip-off may have been the SAG ensemble award which went to Crash even if it seemed that they were really honoring the film with the most actors as opposed to the best acted ensemble. Maybe it was partly that. Maybe it was a revolt against the idea of "outsiders" all but dictating what the Academy should do. Maybe they really did like Ang Lee's direction better than the film itself. Whatever the reason, 2005 is likely to always be looked at as the year Brokeback Mountain lost, rather than Crash won.
Next to Brokeback Mountain, the year's best film had to be David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which shockingly received only two Oscar nominations - one for Best Adapted Screenplay and one for Best Supporting Actor for William Hurt whose performance was hardly the best in the film. The best nominated film, after Brokeback Mountain, had to be George Clooney's nostalgic Good Night, and Good Luck. Bennett Miller's Capote and Steven Spielberg's Munich were good films that placed sixth and seventh on my ten best list for the year, but I preferred Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener and Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale for those slots.
Paul Haggis is a decent writer as he has proved with his Oscar nominated screenplay for 2004's Million Dollar Baby and his subsequent win for 2006's Letters from Iwo Jima, but not with his Oscar winning screenplay here. Good Night, and Good Luck and The Squid and the Whale were more deserving of wins in this year's Original Screenplay category. As a director, I thought he did a better job with 2007's In the Valley of Elah than here. Only the non-nominated David Cronenberg really comes close to Ang Lee's mastery this year.
My votes go to Brokeback Mountain and Ang Lee.