Ang Lee earns best-director Oscar
(AP/Reuters)
Updated: 2006-03-06 12:50

LOS ANGELES - Ang Lee won the Academy Award as best director Sunday for the cowboy romance "Brokeback Mountain," becoming the first Asian to win Hollywood's top honor for filmmakers.

Adept at genres from Westerns to historical romance to martial-arts pageants, Lee won his Oscar for a purely American story about two men tragically swept up in a gay romance that they conceal from their families for two decades.

Best director winner Ang Lee poses with his Oscar at the 78th annual Academy Awards in Hollywood, March 5, 2006. Lee won for his work on "Brokeback Mountain." [Reuters]

"Well, I wish I knew how to quit you," Lee said, smiling and clutching his Oscar.

The characters "taught all of us who made `Brokeback Mountain' so much about not only gay men and women whose love is denied by society, but just as important the greatness of love itself."

"Brokeback Mountain" earned Lee the best-director honor at key earlier Hollywood awards, including the Directors Guild of America ceremony and the Golden Globes.

At 51, Lee scored an Oscar triumph in Hollywood unmatched even by Asia's most acclaimed filmmaker, the late Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, whose career spanned five decades. Kurosawa received an honorary Oscar in 1990, delivered a foreign-language winner with 1975's "Dersu Uzala" and was nominated for best-director for 1985's "Ran," but did not win.

Born in Taiwan, Lee first came to Hollywood's notice with the romantic charmers "The Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," which earned back-to-back Oscar nominations for foreign-language film for 1993 and 1994.

Since then, Lee has been a chameleon. He made the Jane Austen costume romance "Sense and Sensibility," a best-picture nominee; the stark American drama "The Ice Storm"; the Western "Ride With the Devil"; and the martial-arts epic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which won the Oscar for foreign-language film five years ago.

"Crouching Tiger" also was a best-picture and best-director nominee at the Oscars.

His "Crouching Tiger" follow-up was the comic-book adaptation "Hulk," an unusual commercial departure for the independent-minded director.

Lee joked about his commercial foray at Saturday's Independent Spirit Awards, where "Brokeback Mountain" won best picture and director. "Crouching Tiger" took the same prizes at the Spirit Awards five years earlier.

"It's been five years since the last time I stood here. Between `Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' and `Brokeback Mountain,' I made `The Hulk,'" Lee said, drawing a big laugh from the Spirit Awards crowd. "But in my mind I've never left the independent spirit."