Gregory King has penned
in Bay Windows an excellent analysis of Brokeback Mountain's
defeat (we hope to post a fuller version soon). King explains the
significance of a Best Picture win, which can "generate tens of
millions in additional revenue...while also serving as a
green-light for films with similar themes in the future." And he
explains:
The defeat of Brokeback Mountain was a serious blow, one that suggests that Hollywood feels unable to endorse a gay love story with its highest honor, even if it means overturning years of Oscar precedent to do so.
What precedent, you ask? King relates (and I didn't know
this):
No film in history that has won the best picture award from both the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Association has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. No film that has won the producers', directors' and writers' guild awards has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain. No film that has won the Golden Globe, the directors' guild award and led in Oscar nominations, has ever lost the best picture Oscar, until Brokeback Mountain.
And he adds, "Make no mistake, the motion picture academy used a tire iron on Brokeback Mountain Sunday night.
And there's this sad fact:
Others report widespread distaste for Brokeback among the academy's older members, a distaste expressed by Tony Curtis, who told Fox News that he would not even see the film before voting against it. The New York Times on Monday quoted an attendee at an Oscar party who noted, without irony, that older academy voters opposed Brokeback Mountain because it "diminished" cowboys as iconic figures in movies.
King quotes LA Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who
wrote:
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.
We still have a very long way to go, and Hollywood hypocrites, smugly congratulating themselves for being so very, very special, aren't helping.
More. The Washington Blade's Nevin Naff shows why Crash-derivative, recycled, contrived and overstated-wasn't the year's best.
Still more!!! Brokeback author Annie Proulx,
writing
in the Guardian: "Rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the
Academy voters with DVD copies of 'Trash'-excuse me-'Crash' a few
weeks before the ballot deadline."