LOS ANGELES, March 5 (Xinhuanet) -- Ang Lee won the best director Oscar for his gay cowboy movie "Brokeback Mountain," the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Sunday evening in Hollywood.

    The film has won Oscars for best original score and best adapted screenplay at the 78th annual Academy Awards ceremony at the Kondak Theatre. With 8 nominations, it was also expected as this year's biggest Oscar winner.

    Based on Annie Proulx's 30-page short story of the same name, the film roughly traverses two decades in the lives of two cowboys, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, who befriend each other on the Wyoming mountain with the now-iconic name, and discover feelings they never knew existed.

    For all the visual bravado and the overreaching scale of the effort, Lee "masterfully keeps the film itself in tight, extreme close-up," film reviwers said.

    It was only the fourth time in the history of the Academy Awards that the five nominees for Best Director and Best Film were the same. And despite some stiff competition from the likes of George Clooney and Steven Spielberg, Lee came out on top.

    While accepting the Oscar statue, the 51-year-old director said his film "taught all of us just as important the greatness of loveitself."

    The gay love story has earned other honors for Lee, including the Directors Guild of America ceremony and the Golden Globes.

    Before the Oscar ceremony, Lee said he felt less pressure to win Oscars for Brokeback Mountain than five years ago, when he was nominated for the best director award for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

    "I was nervous last time, likely because I shouldered a cultural mission for reinvigorating the Chinese-language film industry back then," Lee said.

    Born in Taiwan, China, Lee stuck to his hometown roots with two critically acclaimed movies in his early career: "The Wedding Banquet" in 1993 and "Eat Drink Man Woman" in 1994.

    Both movies were deeply rooted in Chinese culture, but won international audiences.

    Then, Lee made a surprise to direct the 1995 film adaptation of"Sense and Sensibility," Jane Austen's classic novel about love among the rural English gentry.

    The movie was nominated for an Oscar best picture. Lee won directing awards that year from the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

    In 2000, Lee made "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," an epic tale of martial arts masters in love that became the highest grossing foreign-language film ever released in the United States.