Director Ang
Lee's Brokeback Mountain lassoed four
prizes--Best Film, Best director, Best Adapted
Screenplay (for Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana), and
Best Supporting Actor (for Jake Gyllenhaal)--to
top the Orange British Academy Film Awards on Sunday.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was named Best Actor for
Capote, and Reese Witherspoon won as Best Actress
for Walk the Line. Thandie Newton won as Best
Supporting Actress in Crash.
James Schamus,
who produced Brokeback with cowriter Ossana,
noted that it is a "gay shepherd movie" and not a gay
cowboy movie. He thanked Focus Features and his "chief
shepherd Ang Lee" for putting the movie together, and
described producing Brokeback as "the greatest
professional part of my life." Lee told the gathered
press that after The Hulk he had been very stressed.
He also thanked the film's backers for giving a
Taiwanese-American director the opportunity to make
such a film.
Gyllenhaal
described backstage just how "amazed" he was to secure
the award. "This film has made a social impression on me,
and it has already had a political impact," Gyllenhaal
said.
Nick Park's
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the
Were-Rabbit secured the Alexander Korda Award for
Outstanding British Film of the Year, marking the
first time an animated film won the prize. In the
event's other exclusively British category, the Carl Foreman
award for Special Achievement by a Director, Producer,
or Writer in a First Feature went to director Joe
Wright for Pride and Prejudice. Wright
pointedly said it was an oversight by the British
Academy that his film's female lead, Keira Knightley, had
been overlooked for a nomination.
The winner of
this year's award for Non-English Language Movie was De
Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete (The Beat That
My Heart Skipped), directed by Jacques
Audiard. Richard Attenborough presented retired
Oscar-winning film producer David Puttnam (Chariots
of Fire, The Killing Fields, The Mission) with
the academy's highest accolade, the Academy
Fellowship. Puttnam had the auditorium in tears with a
tribute to his father and said backstage that he would
be unlikely to return to film but "would like to
revisit documentaries," where he started.
The Orange
British Academy Film Awards, hosted for the sixth time by
openly gay humorist Stephen Fry, were telecast live Sunday
night on BBC One. Orange is a cellular phone company.
(Stuart Kemp, Reuters)
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