I didn't say it was a fact, I said I don't know and that I doubt it. Most BBM supporters, however, put it out as a fact and by saying that those who don't believe that homophobia played a role are naive, you put it as a fact as well. You ignored my comments about the breakdown and how the overlaps were BY FAR not enough to determine the winner beforehand. It's like saying Group A, Gourp B, Group C and Group D all voted the same film es Best Picture, so Group E DEFINITELY should have voted the same film, despite the fact that the overlaps were by far not enough. Just because there are no precedents for something, doesn't mean it can't happen. Time to leave the personal issue out of this, dar.

Erm... personal issue? What?

Fact: that overlap you talk about happened for the first time with Brokeback mountain. No such thing has happened before. And no, apparently It has nothing to do with the fact that Brokeback was the first gay movie that had a chance to win. Most people - and I think you including - were saying many months ago that Brokeback wasn´t going to do well at the Oscars cause It was a "gay cowboy movie". But now, that didn´t play a factor in its loss, the biggest upset in oscar history. Ok...

It this case was so exceptional, shouldn´t look for exceptional reasons too? Cause the ones you state could happen every other year but It didn´t, funnily enough.

I am just saying - and others are - that in played SOME part in it. You, on the other hand, are saying it played no part at all, which is for me as extreme as to say It was the whole story and nothing else, that It was all due to homophobia - something I haven´t said, and I don´t think anybody else has. For that, I call you naive, which is not by far the worst thing they can call you on an Internet forum, dear Doctor. You can call me overly suspicious or paranoid if you want to... I really do not care.

I said I doubt it played a part. Stop making it seem as if I stated it as a fact. You have no idea whether it played a part or not, no idea whatsoever, just like me. One of the things we learn in Psychology all the time when we make statistics is that coincidences are just possibly, no mater how unlikely they are and to rule them out, now that, my friend, that is naive.

No such thing happened before? Truly yes, but as I said, you are simply speaking different groups here. Now you can say that if 5 groups found one movie to be the best out of five, the probability is great that the sixth will find it best as well. It is great, but it is not 100%. You need to realize that of those who gave Brokeback the big awards only about 20-30% belong to the Academy and obviously not every single one of them voted for Brokeback in the guilds either. As I said, there are so many Academy members who we simply have no idea how they voted, like the SAG members. Maybe Brokeback Mountain got the least votes there? We don't know.

Hey, you stole my line. I was the first to say that It was al, pure speculation, that nobody knows, and nobody ever will.

But, even if we don´t know, history shows that such thing happened for the first time. And It was with a gay movie. And you failed to acknowledge Tony Curtis declarations and several reports about Academy membersa not even watching BBM due to the subject matter (I can provide links). But in any case, It is as silly of me trying to convince you, as It is the other way round. And in any case, It´s not like Box office, when we would eventually know how was right about a final gross.

Coincidence or not, It´s a question of belief... I think facts points strongly to one side of the argument, you think It doesn´t... So I think we should just leave it at that. And when we become Academy members, tell it from the inside.

Fair enough. I'm off to writing my Brokeback Mountain review now

Picture this...

You are in the Academy... You're deciding which film to vote for, Crash or Brokeback Mountain...

You think to yourself... If I vote for Crash people might think I'm homophobic... but if I vote for Brokeback Mountain people might think I'm racist...

Racism is frowned more upon in our society than homophobia... which would you choose?

Ummm, when you have reports of academy memebers refusing to even SEE the movie, and the same people/other openly saying that they would not vote for BBM because of its subject matter, I do think it is ridiculously naive to say it did not play a role in the outcome/BBM lost votes because og homophobia. I can say that as a fact and not even have to think twice about it.

The only thing that is really up for debate, IMO, is wether if you took those people out of the scenario it would have made a difference. It won 3 Oscars so it's not like it had completely no support, early reports from academy award polls among academy memebers showed that crash and brokeback mountain were pretty much neck and neck in the race. So I personally think it would have LIKELY made the difference to push the race in the other direction. That's my opinion.

But seriously I don't know what kind of world some people live in if they think homophobia played NO role in the race at all.

An unbiased one?

I'm not saying this as a response to Lecter but something I've learned over the past few weeks (and not from Oscars or whatever)..

There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion. People can come close to or approach an unbias objective, but there is no such thing as being unbias. I don't see that as an opinion, but a truth and fact.

It seems like no one ever really seems to have stopped and consider that more people in the Academy just liked Crash more.

Obviously I'm not a homophobic person but I would've voted for Crash over Brokeback if I were in the Academy.

And if that makes me a second-class citizen or something then so be it, heh.

Libs, you, like many others, failed to realize the real argument here. It's about numbers. I'm getting a little tired of explaining, but here we go again:

I believe the majority of people in the academy who voted for Crash truly believe it's the best film of the year, or the best of the five nominated films, just like how you and Lecter and getluv and many of KJers would've done. However, if the number of people in the academy who supported Crash was higher than those who supported Brokeback from the beginning, then we would have seen Crash winning more awards and having more nominations, don't you think? It won three awards total, THREE, before Oscar, where Brokeback won about 20.

As I said, not enough overlaps. If BBM ALSO won the SAG, now that'd have been suspicious.

But the awards that come before Oscar aren't always the same, they don't always correlate.

I'm fully confident Crash won because of the number of actors voting. I even to seem recall people like Jodie Foster and Shirley MacLaine being like "Oh, yeah, Crash, that was my favorite from last year" in some thread we had here a while ago.

#1: I would hope to think the best actor award goes to the actor who's playing the character, not to the character itself!

#2: If Crash had won all the awards leading up to the Oscars, and then it suddenly lost BP (to whatever other film, it doesn't matter), people would be screaming racism at the Academy.

This is why we are screaming 'homophobia' right now. Problem is, homophobia is still dismissed by a majority of society as a problem, and people are in denial over it and/or don't want to deal with it. It IS the reason BBM lost. Plain and simple.

#3 I really hate that it has become this BBM vs. Crash war over which film was better. That's not the issue. The issue is the snub of BBM, regardless of whatever other movie was chosen to snub it with.

One thing that I HAVE to wonder is, what would have happened in a non Olympics year? The Oscars were pushed back to avoid the Olympics, and this could have just essentially burnt out alot of Brokeback Mountain's momentum (which wouldn't be surprising, considering that its box office did stall faster than many would have expected). 2004 had Jan 25-Feb 27th between nods and the show, with MDB spending only 5 weeks in wide release before the awards. It was able to keep up the momentum it was building. This year it was from Jan 31-Mar 5, so longer than usual. Brokeback went wide (600 +) Jan 13th, so had twice the length of time before the awards, leading to some of the box office cooling it experienced. The Golden Globes this year happened on Jan 16th. Last year they were Jan 17, 2005. So essentially, there were 48 days in between this year's Golden Globes and Oscars, while last year there were 41 days in between. In awards season, that is a big difference, and that week that the Oscars were bumped back could have made a difference, but we'll never know!

I disagree.

As said earlier, Crash could've only had 1% more of the votes than Brokeback.

I just don't see why the Oscars have to turn political and metaphorical every single year.

If we take that into account, we have to do the same with Tony Curtis´ obviously homophobe statement and with the reports of academy members refusing to see the film. And those were from before the ceremony, when Crash winning seemed almost impossible.

And those awards did ALWAYS correlate when a movie won them all. Till now.

Oh well.

I guess this is just gonna be one of those debates that doesn't really have a solution, imo.

No, It doesn´t... does it?

Twenty years for now, people will be still discussing this thing, probably. Or maybe not. I wonder how is this really go down in Oscar history...

Lecter, you're hanging onto one thing, SAG Ensemble, that hasn't had a good tracking record at all.

I don't deny it is possible that Brokeback Mountain could have won most of its awards/guilds by 10 votes, while Crash won SAG ensemble by 500 votes, and in the end Crash pulled it off purely purely by the numbers. But in 77 years of Oscar history, that had never happened, so why the first time has to happen when a gay-theme movie was leading? If it doesn't sound fishy to you, then I won't ever be able to convince you. It is too big a coincidence to not dig deeper. We are talking about the type of precursor sweeps we only saw with Schindler's List, American Beauty, and Titanic. I mean, American Beauty wasn't that accessible to begin with.

We have had a lot of overwhelming frontrunners throughout the history of Oscar, and none lost their lead completely at the end. Yes, as Lecter said, everything always has that first time, but why it has to be this year? Isn't that too much of a coincidence to believe? No, Hollywood isn't homophobia, but I firmly believe the number of people who voted against Brokeback because of their belief instead of voted for Crash are just enough to become the reason that Crash won.

I am not convinced anymore. As I said, it was an entirely different group of people voting, the overlaps that we know of (basically only BAFTA, DGA, WGA and PGA) are not big enough to come to a conclusion. We don't know by how much BBM won there. We do know that all of them together maybe make up for about 25-30% of Academy voters. We don't know about the other 70-75%.

Regardless of what you might think, Lecter, homophobia *did* have an effect on the Crash win. While we're speculating, say Crash won by a handful of votes. With people like Tony Curtis- an extremely popular and influential actor - refusing with others, it isn't hard to believe that a sizable group of people turned down BM For Sure. Like it or not, it's a fact that a portion of voters refused to vote because of it. We can only speculate this group was sizable enough to have an impact, and statistically speaking... it seems rather large. Xia has gone into that enough.

Okay, this is a good point. If BBM lost by 10-15 votes, you'd be right, indeed. Thing is, we don't know that. Won't know that either.

On the other hand, even if those people saw BBM, you think they'd have voted for it then? Hehe

Hoffman won, Felicity didn't. Brokeback didn't. Crash did. There were so many categories where theories could be thought up, foreign language film, best actress, picture, director, etc. The reason this year is so polarizing is that there hasn't been this level of charged Oscar films in a long time. I think if Brokeback Mountain was such a huge problem for the Academy, they wouldn't have given it 8 nominations to begin with. But out of its 8, it wasn't expected to even take all that much other than 4 or so. It may have led the nominations, but going in, people knew it wasn't going to sweep the night, as their were other frontrunners around for individual categories. Picture of course was a surprise, but I don't think Brokeback was margins ahead of the other films with the Academy, otherwise maybe we could have expected a 6 + win total. An upset wasn't 100% impossible, considering no film was expected to sweep a majority of the awards this year, which was indeed the case. I'm sure bias played some sort of role, but things like Ebert's support, Oprah's support, etc do all together make a difference...

Obviously they didn't vote for it and wouldn't have. That's the point- voters have been putting personal prejudice first, something seemingly hypocritical for America's progressives.