On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Williams talks about the impact of Brokeback Mountain and shares how she feels about its Best Picture loss…
Promoting her series Dying for Sex, Michelle Williams appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohenwhere Cohen and her took a moment to discuss Brokeback Mountain. Gushing over its importance, Cohen declared it as one of his top two movies. He then asked the five-time Academy Award nominee if she could have predicted its impact.
“Yes, because people were so open about it,” she shared. “I remember doing the junket, you don’t really get an opportunity to see a lot of grown men cry, right? That was the moment that I think we all knew it was going to be special.”
When Cohen expressed his anger about the film losing Best Picture at the 78th Academy Awards to Crash, William’s, with a hint of shade, responded “What was Crash?”
It’s been almost 20 years since Brokeback Mountain lost the Oscar’s top prize. After being the frontrunner of the award season, many were shocked when Jack Nicholson announced Crash as the Best Picture winner. The film, for those who forget, interweaves the storylines of several Los Angeles citizens whose separate lives “crash” into one another due to race, gender, class and family.
The win has been called one of the most controversial and worst Best Picture wins in Academy history. In 2025, Rolling Stone placed it last in its ranking of Best Picture winners since 2000. The publication wrote “It’s still mind-boggling to think that Paul Haggis’s two-hour lecture about racism (bad), class disparity (also bad), and how we let our many differences divide us when really we’re the same broken people underneath it all (why can’t we all just get along?!?) garnered a half dozen Academy Award nominations, much less won Hollywood’s highest honor.” Other critics call the film tone-deaf and outdated.
In comparison, director Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has been described as a timeless classic with Medium calling it “nothing short of a romantic masterpiece” in 2024. The film follows two cowboys (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall) who are hired as sheepherders in Wyoming. After spending time on Brokeback Mountain the pair develop a deep, emotional and complex romantic relationship that plays out over the course of 20 years.
In 2024, its director told IndieWire its loss was a form of discrimination from the academy with many agreeing it may have been due to homophobia within the voting body. Its loss has been highly debated by critics with some saying Crash was the “safest” bet.
Brokeback Mountain was nominated for eight Oscars making Ledger, Gyllenhaal and Williams first-time nominees. It took home Best Director for Ang Lee, who became the first Asian person to win in that category, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score. The film was also the backdrop for a true love story between Williams and Ledger, who would have a daughter together in 2005.
POST A COMMENT