BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN vs. CRASH

I FINALLY forced myself to watch CRASH on Showtime last night. If for nothing else, I had to see what all the fuss was about. I also wanted to see if CRASH truly deserved Best Picture honors. ....Backtracking, first: I was not a huge fan of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN to begin with. To me, the movie wasnt a love story at all. I walked away from the movie not thinking these men loved each other, so much as they used each other to satisfy sexual urges. And their actions spoke of cowardness to me. Though to be fair, I didn't live during that time and have no idea the level of harassment gay men had to put up with, let alone gay cowboys putting up with it. So the movie was really good, but BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN just wasn't great. ...But, like many gay men, I got caught up in the politics of everything and I realllly would have loved to have seen a gay-themed film grab top honors at the Oscars. And so, when Jack Nicholson read off CRASH as the Best Picture, I felt like someone kicked me in the gut. THE INJUSTICE of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN LOSING!!!!....Well, as i said, I just saw CRASH last night. And now I know why it won: Because it WAS the best movie of the year. Paul Haggis has written an amazing film interweaving dozens of characters across all ethnicities and shows the levels of racism that every ethnicity shares. There are scenes from CRASH that follow me and my thoughts all the time. So where I give BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN a B rating, I give CRASH an A. BOTH films are worth watching, but only one of the two is the Best Picture.