Oscar History (Revised)

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

2006 is going to go down as one of the great misfires in Oscar history. Crash beating out Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture is going to be a black eye, will be a black eye, on Hollywood for the next 20 years. This is a shame. This is a tragedy. This is Florida in 2000 corrupt.

Sure, Oscar has made some major goofs in the past. Dances with Wolves over GoodFellas in 1991. Rocky over Taxi Driver, All the President's Men and Network in 1977. Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan in 1999. But this is much, much worse. Brokeback Mountain dominated the movies this year. It won the most awards, it entered "brokeback" into the lexicon, and gave late-night talk show hosts more material than anything since Dan Quayle was in office. It was the movie everyone was talking about, period. And it was great. It was transcendent. It was everything a Best Picture winner is supposed to be. Crash was none of these things. It was a well-done story with major holes in logic. It was a movie than prompted conversation but changed no one's mind. It simply was not as good. I hate to be dogging it like this because I liked it but it is nowhere near the level of Brokeback.

And we all know why Brokeback lost. There have been whisperings of it for weeks. Jeffrey Wells had been calling it the "Tony Curtis Factor." Older Academy voters, particularly men, were rejecting Brokeback because of fear. Because of homophobia. And nothing makes homophobes more uncomfortable than the idea of two men getting it on. For all the crap Hollywood gets about being "out of touch" or "in a bubble," they showed they can be as intolerant as any neo-con. And they've made history doing it. Shame on them.

I'm not the only one upset:

Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times: "...you could not take the pulse of the industry without realizing that this film made a number of people distinctly uncomfortable. ... In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who've led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed Brokeback Mountain...(Hollywood) likes to pat itself on the back for the good it does in the world, but as Sunday night's ceremony proved, it is easier to congratulate yourself for a job well done in the past than to actually do that job in the present."

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe:"The memo from Hollywood seems clear enough. Better to reward the movie about people who clean our closets than the one about the men who live in them."

Tom Shales, Washington Post: "Film buffs and the politically minded...will be arguing this morning about whether the Best Picture Oscar to "Crash" was really for the film's merit or just a cop-out by the Motion Picture Academy so it wouldn't have to give the prize to "Brokeback Mountain."

Jack Matthews, New York Daily News: "...enough Academy voters found the gay subject matter of "Brokeback Mountain" too uncomfortable to sit through, meaning they abandoned their professional responsibility and didn't watch all five nominated films."

Jeffrey Wells, hollywood-elsewhere.com: "Most of the pundits are going to try to sidestep or soft-pedal what happened, and if you're looking for that kind of thing you know where to find it. This wasn't a replay of Shakespeare in Love beating out Saving Private Ryan. It was worse...a whole lot worse. Crash is a good film -- an emotional, well-tooled, sometimes profound look at several racist and heavily bruised Los Angelenos who somehow manage to listen now and then to the better angels of their nature. They do this infrequently and haphazardly, but just enough at the end of the day (and the film) to earn our compassion. Nice movie message -- now welcome to real life. The fact is that last night a lot of good-hearted people, bottom line, were essentially cheering the fact that a bunch of retro-graders and hang-backers in the Motion Picture Academy voted for Crash for the wrong reasons...The very thing that Crash laments -- prejudice against people of different stripes and persuasions -- is what tipped the vote and delivered the Big Prize."

Echoing Wells, the most important thing to point out here is this is not the same as the Academy voting for a sentimental favorite like Rocky or Shakespeare in Love. It is the fact that they voted for Crash because too many of them were too uncomfortable to watch Brokeback Mountain at all. Not to get too crazy, but we witnessed something like a hate crime last night. It's only a matter of time before Paul Haggis and the other very talented people behind Crash are forced to confront the fact that they won a tainted election. Their "victory" will be forever tarnished. It's a shame that these good people are going to be in the crossfire of this particular Culture War.