Quit Yer Sniveling

I am really tired of hearing the individuals associated with the movie Brokeback Mountain complain of how they were robbed of the Best Picture Award at the Oscars last month. These people make ridiculous claims: the Academy members are close-minded, Hollywood is playing it safe, the Academy is out of touch with the rest of the country, etc.

And now the author of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx, is joining in. Here’s a thought: maybe your movie wasn’t the best one that was released last year. To be fair, I have not seen Brokeback Mountain, nor the movie that actually won the Best Picture Award, Crash, however I did hear that both are excellent films. But it seems to me that Brokeback… offers little more than a love story, albeit one between two men (cowboys, nevertheless; didn’t South Park lampoon this idea years ago, claiming that independent films were just about gay cowboys eating pudding?).

Brokeback Mountain received a lot of attention because of it’s subject matter, and that seems to be the card that the makers of the film want to exploit (by claiming they didn’t win because the Academy voters are close-minded). However, there have been plenty of films dealing with the subject of homosexuality before, and there are sure to be plenty more afterwards. Should To Wong Foo… have won an Oscar because the movie features drag queens as the main characters?

While I don’t agree with every award given by the Academy, it seems to me that Crash was simply the better film. And since when is Hollywood concerned about stirring up controversy?