I'm still bitter, and with good reason

Quite a bit of time has passed since this year's Academy Awards ceremony, and I still feel like we were robbed. I still feel like Brokeback Mountain should have won the Best Picture Oscar instead of Crash, and after reading quite a few articles about it, I now know I'm not the only one and I have very good reasons to feel bitter and bruised.

These are excerpts from the articles I've read. From the Los Angeles Times' The Envelope's "Breaking No Ground":

[...]
You could not take the pulse of the industry without realizing that this film made a number of people distinctly uncomfortable.
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More than any other of the nominated films, "Brokeback Mountain" was the one people told me they really didn't feel like seeing, didn't really get, didn't understand the fuss over.
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It may be true, as producer Cathy Schulman said in accepting the Oscar for best picture, that this was "one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American history," but "Crash" is not an example of that.
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The reality of this film, the reason it won the best picture Oscar, is that it is, at its core, a standard Hollywood movie, as manipulative and unrealistic as the day is long.
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So for people who were discomfited by "Brokeback Mountain" but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, "Crash" provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what "Brokeback" had to offer. And that's exactly what they did.

From Boston.com News' "Hollywood isn't being straight with gay community":

The crash you heard late Sunday night was not only Jack Nicholson announcing the best-picture Oscar winner. It was the sound of lots of closet doors slamming shut in a huff.
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Some movies are born political, and others have politics thrust upon them. Poor ''Brokeback Mountain" was such a movie. Ang Lee's adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story was not out to attack us with a statement. It really is just an unhappy love story that happens to have enormous social relevance because its protagonists are two men.
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the average age of voters is rumored to be 60-something, which means that ''Crash" might have triggered a civil-rights hot flash in the Academy.
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Oddly, the characters doing all the colliding in ''Crash" are straight. Director and co-writer Paul Haggis was sure to populate his movie Noah's Ark-style, with two or three members of various races, ethnicities, and social classes represented. Homosexuals didn't make the cut.

Thus the win for ''Crash" makes an interesting point about where Hollywood stands on the whole gay issue -- less ''I wish I knew how to quit you" and more ''not that there's anything wrong with that."
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In an attempt to ''normalize" ''Brokeback Mountain" during Sunday night's broadcast Stewart trotted out a montage of great homoerotic moments in Westerns. It put the movie in an irreverent cinematic context, and it was very funny until you realized that, because the men in the montage aren't truly gay, all that clip reel actually does is reinforce paranoia about what seems gay. Just like the ''Brokeback" parodies sprouting all over the Internet, it was a backhanded compliment -- progressive, yet misleading, true but false, distancing and distorted.

In the very same way that straight Stewart happily woke up in bed with straight Clooney during one of Sunday night's skits, it was more insidiously coy illusion. Smirking and winking pussyfoots around the issue. Waking up beside Harvey Fierstein and loving it -- that's pushing the envelope.

From The Raw Story's "Oscar the chicken":

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But historically, the Oscars have always been about politics. The Academy does not always award the best of the best, preferring instead to play favorites. Box office hits like Titanic have always been Academy winners, and oftentimes Best Actor and Best Actress go to performances that were decent but not spectacular. Denzel Washington, snubbed for his role in Malcolm X, was awarded his gold statue for the mediocre Training Day.
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The Academy, in all its grandeur, chickened out. They opted for a message movie, the trite and convenient Crash.
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But when we think about art, and about what it takes to create art and to make it watchable and loveable, Crash is precisely the kind of movie that lies outside the boundary of what nuanced art is supposed to do. In writing classes, instructors offer the following advice: Less is More. Driving home a point through overwriting only makes things obvious and ineffective. What works is careful character development and emotional discovery. Cinematography. The Still Shot.

The love that unraveled in Brokeback Mountain had just as much to do with the frames locked on Wyoming's untouched land as they did with the two men dominating most scenes. But in Crash, everything that should have been clear through action was said aloud. Stereotypes were voiced through characters who were so one-dimensional they would barely stand a chance in the real world. It is worth noting, then, that Americans were ready for Brokeback Mountain, even though the Academy was not. Call it disappointing, or call it politics, but the Academy was ready to send a message about intolerance -- we are political, they want us to believe -- but they were not ready to send a message about the ubiquitousness of love.

From Entertainment Weekly:

[...]
After trailing Brokeback Mountain in the awards race for the past three months, Crash surprised not only Nicholson but most of the Kodak Theater audience members.
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In the weeks leading up to the Oscars, Brokeback had won the top prizes from the Producers Guild, British Academy, and Golden Globes, while Crash's arsenal contained a Screen Actors Guild ensemble prize and, well, not much else, other than mixed reviews. In 18 out of the previous 22 years, the Oscar went to a film that won a Golden Globe for Best Picture; Crash wasn't even nominated.
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Did Brokeback peak too early? Are there so many awards shows these days that Academy members just wanted something else to win for once? Did Crash particularly resonate with Oscar voters, the majority of whom live or work in Los Angeles? One hypothesis suggested that much of the Academy's older constituency was turned off by Brokeback's same-sex love story. As the film's Oscar-winning co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry said backstage after Best Picture was announced, "Perhaps the truth really is: Americans don't want cowboys to be gay." Indeed, asked at Hollywood's old guard "Night of 100 Starts" party what he thought of Brokeback Mountain, Ernest Borgnine, who won Best Actor 50 years ago for Marty, responded, "I didn't see it and I don't care to see it. I know they say it's a good picture but I don't care to see it. If John Wayne were alive, he'd be rolling in his grave."

So there you have it. Consciously or not, Mr. Borgnine summed up the feelings (and fears) of old-Hollywood, and gave us the real reason why Brokeback didn't win: BIGOTRY. He said it himself, he didn't see the movie, and although they told him it was a "good picture" he didn't want to see it because... it portrayed cowboys as gays, apparently a big no-no. He had to vote for the BEST picture of the year (a duty I would take quite seriously) and really only had to watch five movies to make up his mind, but he, like many others probably, didn't even bother watching the one that had won EVERYTHING up to that point not because he couldn't find the time or it wasn't playing anywhere near him, but because he didn't like the idea that the epitome of macho-man, the cowboy, could be gay too (and what's with his John Wayne line? If he were alive, why would he be rolling in his grave?!)

So it's final, the movie that was the front runner, that won every major award out there, that was the best and the most honest and basically deserved the big prize, lost possibly because it dealt with homosexuality but certainly because it showed the wrong type of guy as gay. Who knows, if Jack and Ennis had been working on Wall Street or as waiters in Miami, maybe, just maybe Brokeback Whatever might have won.

Furthermore, Crash didn't deserve to win (in the biggest Oscar upset since Shakespeare in Love trumped Saving Private Ryan in 1999) because although it dealt with important issues, its message was fluffy, a façade, while Brokeback Mountain's was real, in your face but not in a rude way. Brokeback said what it had to say without much fanfare and it offered us real people, living real emotions. Crash only hinted at what it wanted to say, and his character development was seriously lacking, not in small part due to the large ensemble.

The tactic? A too familiar one at this point. I read that Lionsgate, Crash's distributor, played into the audience's sentiment by running heart-tugging ads in trade papers asking Academy members to "remember how it made you feel." Nothing wrong so far, but what's worrisome is this:

The film makers believe this tactic, along with the 130,000 DVDs they mailed to guild members, helped set the film apart. And if the barnstorming $4 million campaign evokes memories of Miramax in its Weinstein-led heyday, that could be because Lionsgate relied on the input of some key Miramax vets. "[Just being] good is not, at the moment, enough," producer Cathy Schulman says of Crash's triumph. "It was about word of mouth and how you sustain yourself. And that required being distinguishable."

It sounds like political campaigns, where the candidate with the most money usually ends up winning.

And the saddest thing is that I actually really liked Crash. It was my second choice (although I have reconsidered that too now) among the five, albeit a long distant runner up. And now that it has stolen Brokeback's crown, I'm saddened by how much the memory of the movie has been soiled.

This is what Brokeback's co-writer and producer Diana Ossana had to say about her movie's loss:

"It was bittersweet, but honestly, the film will always be there. That movie will find its way for months and years to come."

That's certainly true and, ultimately, probably the best outcome. Crash did get the all important little statue named Oscar, but its legacy will always be that it took it from Brokeback, the movie that really deserved it, the movie that got robbed because Hollywood was too much of a bigot to recognized it as the best among all.

See, Shakespeare In Love is indeed remembered as the movie that upset Saving Private Ryan's supposed front runner status, but Ryan was mostly expected to win because it was Steven Spielberg's follow up to his Oscar winning Schindler's List, while Shakespeare had as much, if not more, artistic credentials as Ryan. And a better marketing campaign.

In the end, Brokeback got to be talked about even more than if it had actually won. If it had won, as everyone expected, it would have been noted and soon forgotten. This way, while all the talk about Crash centered on its sudden upset status and not much else, Brokeback was actually getting lauded as the "real" winner, even without the golden statue. Crash was a spoiler and everybody knows it.

A few interesting facts:

• Crash's three total wins mark the fewest victories for a Best Picture since Rocky also won three in 1977.
• Ang Lee became the first nonwhite filmmaker to win the Best Director Oscar.
• Crash's victory made Oscar history, marking the first time a film-festival acquisition (it premiered at Toronto in 2004) won Best Picture.
• Crash's director, Paul Haggis, who also wrote Million Dollar Baby, became the first person to write back-to-back Best Picture winners.
• For only the third time ever, the top six prizes went to six different movies.
• Charlize Theron was erroneously referred to as South African-American. She lives in the US, but isn't a citizen.
• The 16 prerecorded "underscores" playing during the acceptance speeches, were producer's Gil Cates' idea. Musical director Bill Conti said, "As long as I don't do it live, because it'll spook [the winners]... they'll think I'm playing them off!" No one in the audience heard the music; it was only on TV.
• Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep weren't ad-libbing. Longtime Tomlin collaborator Jane Wagner wrote the speech, and the actresses worked together to nail the Altmanesque flair, including overlapping dialogue.
• 3 of the 6 Best Supporting Actress winners since 2000 were pregnant.
• 1947: the last year in which the most Oscars won by any film was just three.
• 1961: the last year in which all four acting winners took home a trophy for their first acting nod.
• $53,404,817: theatrical gross of Crash, the lowest Best Picture total since 1987's The Last Emperor made $43,984,230.
• $51,470,821: theatrical gross of 2003 Best Picture winner The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King... in its first two days.

And if you care to read what Brokeback's original writer, Annie Proulx, had to say about her original creation's loss, go here. She might sound like a sore loser, but the way I see it, she said what she felt and nothing more. Why should she have kept quiet? I didn't.