Archive
Academy Award Winners 2005
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the winners of the 78th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2005.
In the Best Original Score category, Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla won the Academy Award for his score for director Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, a tender love story about two gay cowboys in rural Montana struggling to reconcile their sexuality. In his acceptance speech Santaolalla said:
Thank you so much, members of the Academy. I’m so proud to have work in this movie, “Brokeback Mountain,” a movie that once again shows us that love is what makes us all very similar in spite that we can be so different, too. I want to thank a few people. I want to thank Ang Lee for his vision, his support, his guidance. I want to thank Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry and Annie Proulx for their inspiration; James Schamus and David Linde, everybody at Focus; Kathy Nelson; Robert Messinger at First Artists; my co-producer and brother Anibal Kerpel; my orchestrator David Campbell; Bob Bernstein; Ron Goldstein. I want to thank my family: my wife Alejandra, my kids Anna, Luna and Don Juan. And last but not least, I want to dedicate this to my mother, a mi madre; to my country, Argentina; and to all the Latinos, para todos Latinos. Muchas gracias. Thank you.
The other nominees for Best Original Score were Alberto Iglesias for The Constant Gardener, John Williams for Memoirs of a Geisha, John Williams for Munich, and Dario Marianelli for Pride & Prejudice.
In the Best Original Song category, Jordan Houston (Juicy J), Cedric Coleman (Frayser Boy) and Paul Beauregard (DJ Paul) won the Academy Award for the hip-hop rap song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” from Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow.
The other nominees for Best Original Song were Kathleen “Bird” York and Michael Becker for “In the Deep” from Crash, with lyrics by York; and Dolly Parton for “Travelin’ Thru” from Transamerica.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN – Gustavo Santaolalla
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
When I first read the plot summary of Brokeback Mountain, I half-wondered whether it was a joke at the expense of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, specifically the episode of South Park where Cartman attends the Sundance film festival and loudly complains that “every fucking independent movie is about gay cowboys in Wyoming!” This is because Brokeback Mountain is, in fact, a movie about gay cowboys in Wyoming. It also happens to he a very, very good one, and is fully deserving of all the critical praise it has been receiving. Adapted from Annie Proulx’s short story by Lonesome Dove writer Larry McMurtry, and directed with sensitivity by Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, two young men – a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy – who meet in the summer of 1963 while working on a sheep farm in rural Wyoming, and unexpectedly embark on a brief, but passionate, homosexual encounter with each other. Read more…

