"Homophobia" Blamed For "Brokeback Mountain" Loss

From The Australian.com:

ANG Lee was clutching his Oscar backstage. He had already won best director for his controversial but acclaimed film, Brokeback Mountain. Now he was waiting for it to claim Hollywood's highest prize.

It had been, he would later say somewhat mournfully, the way his life had gone at awards shows so far this year: first the film wins best adapted screenplay, then best director and then, finally, best film.

Except that Hollywood turned out to be resistant to a film that brazenly sets a homosexual love story in the grand national - and decidedly heterosexual - narrative genre of the western. The Academy turned its back on the Mountain and instead gave its highest prize to Crash in one of the biggest Oscars upsets in years.

When Lee was asked what had happened to his film, which had been the favourite after sweeping all the big precursor awards, he could only shrug.

"You ask me the question, I don't know the answer," he said. "That was a surprise this for me, frankly.

"The box office we did the best of all five movies and we've been winning, sweeping everything. It just happened this way. I really just don't know."

The film's writers, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who won for best adapted screenplay, were similarly puzzled.

"It's bittersweet, certainly," Ossana said. Crash's victory was an upset, but it wasn't entirely unexpected in some circles. Many film colony insiders felt that Brokeback Mountain's subject matter wouldn't resonate with the Academy membership, which is more conservative than many critics of Hollywood's liberalism might believe.

Some male academy members told The Australian that they had not even watched Brokeback Mountain. "It's a movie, I just don't know what they're so afraid of," Ossana said. "Whatever preconceived notions you have, you need to set them aside, the film will shatter those notions. It really isn't what people are imagining in their head. It's a lot more encompassing."

So despite tons of critical acclaim, a plethora of independent film awards, much less 3 Oscars (including one for Best Director), suddenly its "homophobia" that caused "Brokeback Mountain" to lose the Best Picture award.

Couldn't be that "Crash" was simply a better and more believable film or that the Oscar voters just disagreed with those in the Hollywood Left who made "Brokeback" into the second coming of "Gone With The Wind" (the perverted version). Blame it on "homophobia".

Talk about sore losers.