After all the buzz, you would’ve thought Brokeback Mountain would’ve walked into the awards last night and walked out with an armful of trophies. Instead, they were all but shut out of the awards that mattered:

‘Crash’ Pulls Off Upset, Wins Best-Picture
By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer 1 hour, 26 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES - “Crash” pulled off one of the biggest upsets in
Academy Awards history, winning best picture Sunday over the front-runner “Brokeback Mountain.”

“Crash,” featuring a huge cast in crisscrossing story lines over a chaotic 36-hour period in Los Angeles, rode a late surge of praise that lifted it past the cowboy romance “Brokeback Mountain,” a film that had won most other key Hollywood honors.

“We are humbled by the other nominees in this category. You have made this year one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American cinema,” said “Crash” producer Cathy Schulman.

She was commenting on a year that saw the box office sinking, provocative independent films dominating big studio fare and a tiny-budgeted ensemble drama from outside Hollywood taking first prize.

Lead-acting Oscars went to Philip Seymour Hoffman as author Truman Capote in “Capote” and Reese Witherspoon as country singer June Carter in “Walk the Line,” while corporate thrillers earned supporting-performer Oscars for George Clooney in “Syriana” and Rachel Weisz in “The Constant Gardener.”

Okay… First of all, I know a lot of people who have seen Crash and wouldn’t call this an upset. Everyone I know that’s seen this movie has given it amazing reviews and recommended very highly that it be seen.

Second of all, a friend of mine who saw Brokeback and like it a lot made a very astute observation. He said that if Brokeback Mountain were a story about a man and a woman falling in love in a similar fashion, no one in their right mind would’ve given it an award. When asked to clarify, he explained that Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s “romance” goes from 0 to anal sex so fast that it’s not believable, and in the scene where they embrace and start dogging each other in front of one of their wives, a walk ten feet in the other direction would’ve kept their “romance” a secret, but instead they impulsively threw caution to the wind and their wives were completely disregarded all in a span of 20 seconds.

In other words, the movie’s appeal started and ended with the fact that the two lovers in it were gay, and aside from that the movie had very little else to offer. As I said, this was a guy who liked it a lot, not some rabid gaybashing lunatic, which leads me to believe that others who saw the movie realized the same thing and that’s why it didn’t win one of the major awards. The award it did win was Best Director, but if you think about it, that’s an award given to the guy who translates the idea into a movie and brings it to life for you, not the story itself.

Very interesting.

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