It should’ve won best picture too but the Academy was being PC and was too scared to award it.
I don’t think you’re using “PC” the right way.
Political correctness goes both ways. Giving Brokeback Mountain best picture would’ve pissed a lot of people off and offended the dumb masses so they decided to just give it to something else to avoid all that. It’s PC enough to be called PC in my mind.
That’s not what happened though. Many members of the Academy we’re legitimately homophobic and didn’t vote for it because of that.
But going with Crash was very calculated because it was a slightly controversial subject matter, but not as much as Brokeback Mountain.
Crash was like throwing a bone. “Yeah we don’t like the cowboy butt sex stuff but here’s a movie about racism that we can pretend is good!”
Yes. It was all in an attempt to not offend anyone, but in the end everyone was pissed off.
Well, I disagree that it supposedly was done to “not offend anyone.” I think it didn’t win because voters were actually offended.
They found the film offensive so they didn’t select it so as not to offend anyone else (because most Americans were offended by that movie at the time) but they also didn’t want to offend people that actually care about making artistic films about taboo subject matters so they selected Crash hoping that the racial angle would be enough to keep people happy. And then everyone was pissed off. This is why political correctness is an embarrassment; it isn’t just about being decent to people, it also extends to art. What people are offended by often isn’t rational and this was a perfect example of that.
The Academy is not a hive mind or even a committee. It’s individual people making individual choices. A person that didn’t vote for Brokeback Mountain likely isn’t caring about whether most Americans will be offended or not, they’re making their decision based on what they think. Famously at the time there were even voters proudly proclaiming that they were refusing to watch Brokeback because of the gay content.
The idea that every Oscar winner is chosen based solely on political agendas is one of my least favorite semi-conspiracy theories.