Annie Proulx (BBM author) lashes out!!!

[trackaghost]

Originally Posted by Boots

Why did Crash win? It had exceptional writing, beautiful acting, and a hard hitting arc that could leave you on the edge of your seat. It dug deep into the psyche of our society and purged concepts about racism we never knew we had. It had stunning, sweeping moments of anger, horror, sorrow. I'm sorry there are some who don't understand this.

I understood Crash. I think it's insulting to say that I and others didn't like it because we didn't understand it. I also understood it was heavy-handed, muddled and completely unoriginal. As for acting, I personally didn't find any of the performances in that movie as moving or heartbreaking as Heath Ledger's in Brokeback or as brilliant and thoughtful as Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote.

Edit: Oh and Matt Dillon is far more brilliant in Factotum than in Crash.

Originally Posted by Boots

Crash shows a basic, human condition in today's post 911 society that we cannot deny.

That everyone is basically racist?

Originally Posted by Boots

It's good to see a film like Crash get the top honor. To those who don't agree...too bad. I had to suffer through "Titanic" and "The English Patient"...both top Oscar winners in their day, and I ...for the life of me...could NOT understand why those two manipulative, crappy, sappy, films took home best picture.

I thought Crash was every bit as manipulative as those films.

[trackaghost]

Originally Posted by sparky

Sure homophobia had something to do with BBM not winning. I know a lot of AMPAS members and more than one talked to groups of people on sets and in offices and heard "I am not going to watch that fag movie and I won't vote for it." There are a LOT of members who refused to watch it, period. And they weren't shy about gloating about it. The Oscars are, at their heart, a popularity contest as well. People vote for movies their friends are in and their friends worked on. Considering the number of actors in Crash and the fact that it was filmed in LA, it got a lot of votes for that reason as well.
That is a simple flaw in the process of such awards contests.

I'm sure there are lots of different factors to why Brokeback didn't win, Fox bombarding Academy members with screeners probably didn't hurt either. It's just a damn shame really, although I think when people look back in years to come it will be Brokeback Mountain that's remembered.

[sparky]

Originally Posted by Nixxxed

Hey Sparks!

Thanks for the info. Although now I'm more confused than when I first asked my question about the campaign. And here's why:

Starting 15 seconds after the best picture Oscar was announced every headline I read for the next 2 days said "Brokeback snubbed for BP" or something along those lines. And then, the body of most of the stories listed or referenced all the other BP awards that went to BBM, hence the "snub".

So, why did your campaign focus on this (in my eyes) widely-reported fact, instead of focusing on why it happened - which is what you listed in your first paragraph? You have firsthand proof, and I'm sure many others do as well. Why isn't it a "Homophobic Hollywood" campaign, getting all this *really* out in the open? Or is that coming next?

For a few reasons. Number one, witness the sour grapes label tossed at Annie Proulx. There have already been articles about the campaign portraying the contributors as "bitchy queens" when there was nothing bitchy about it.

Number two, many people were involved in the campaign - I had very little to do with it other than giving money. Some people wanted an attack ad, but the main point we wanted to make was to thank the filmmakers. We wanted them to know that it was our Best Picture. In spite of AMPAS.

Number three, there is an organized letter writing campaign about the voting process. Most of this refers to the widely publicized reports about quotes given by the relics Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine. Those two proudly proclaimed they refused to see it, and Borgnine in particular rallied about its very existence. It was decided among the leaders of the forum that this direct to the Academy approach was best in dealing with the voting process. The AMPAS is after all a body of people made up of 6500 members. The only way to address them directly is through the office. As far as anecdotal stories go, that and 4 bucks will get you a Starbucks. The printed quotes are best. Even Sarah Jessica Parker admitted on Conan that she didn't have time to watch the movies and voted anyway.

And then there's the whole issue of how $24-grand could help the community in so many other ways. But I realize that's a double-edged sword - small vs. big picture outlook.

There's also the whole issue of how the money you're spending on the internet could feed starving children all over the world. Right ? Or help someone with HIV. That's a double edged sword, suggesting what people should do with their money, no ?

Back at ya !

[sparky]

Originally Posted by Rickypt

Where I stray from this is that I didn't personally find BB Mountain to be 100% relevant to the current gay experience and found the message to be a little dated. And intentionally so, given when it takes place. But that would get me back into the BB Mountain debate, which I've retired from.

Ryan, I won't attempt to debate you on this one. I can't say it is 100% relevant either. But outside of urban centers, very very little has changed. Go to the Dave Cullen forum and look under My Brokeback Story. There are thousands of men all over the world living the exact same story as the characters in that movie. The exact same story. I hazard to say there are more of them than there are gay ghetto dwellers.

[markolas]

I think it's great to see somebody on "our" side actually get *mad* for a change. I'm sick of the PC, wet noodle, "can't we all just get along" attitude. There are times when you need to "lash out," and I think now is one of those times, not just in relation to BBM.

And to anyone who thinks this is inconsistent with Buddhist spirituality, you should try reading some Buddhist literature besides Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama.

[elie]

@ Trackaghost and Dissention.
I totally agree with your posts (Dissention, not that it is of any importance, but the only part I don't agree with your review is the Lars von Trier part. I can't stand the guy, and funnily enough, pretty much for the same reasons you said you love his movies).
I too understood Crash, and the reason I didn't like it was certainly not that I didn't understand it. What's there not to understand?? It was so overly schematic, simple, naive and in-your-face that a 6 year old kid would have gotten the message. In every scene (in every scene, I repeat) there was some flat, shallow character making obvious yet pompous comments about racism- imagine "Traffic" (a masterpiece, IMO) being filled with statements such as "drugs are a bad thing" or "Just say no".

However, I didn't entirely hate it, because contrary to what others said, I liked Matt Dillon's character and I liked his performance. But that is not enough to make it a Best picture award worthy movie. What I mean to say is that if it hadn't been for the nominations and the awards it got, it wouldn't be bashed so much in general. It would just be a normal, a bit simplistic, not so good movie that belongs on TV, IMO. But at the Oscar race, it beat BBM, which is -regardless of its theme- a movie that can be called without hesitation, great . Heath Ledger's performance is just heartbreaking and the direction is genial - affectionate, subtle and serious and not for one second pompous or full-of-itself, if I may say that.

[DavidMn]

Originally Posted by dissention

"Crash" is a quintessential bad movie. Bad in every way; from the writing to the direction, down to the cinematography that strains to be "realistic" and "gritty" but only ends up being an exercise in annoying those who can see through the filmmakers delusions of grandeur to the superficial sludge that it truly is. It's so eager to be taken seriously that it fails to realize how insistently manipulative it is in it's quest for intellectual recognition on a social level. Maybe it should have concentrated on being a good movie instead of aspiring to be The Greatest Race Film of All Time when the material being worked with was amateurish and on par with the deconstruction of racism found on Channel One during Black History Month.

Paul Haggis takes more characters than can be counted on two hands, tosses them into a blender with contrived situations and woefully cliched observations about race, and spreads the resulting batter out onto a few reels of film that don't even run for two whole hours. The characters resemble no human beings I've met in my lifetime, they're merely caricatures constructed from Haggis' idea of what racists and victims of racism, one in the same to him, hence the labored point to the whole idiotic mess, are like. Not one of his chracters is onscreen long enough to be cared about, even though it would be nearly impossible for such a feat to be accomplished since each one of them embodies the sort of stereotyping that Haggis spends so many minutes preaching against from atop his soapbox. I'm convinced that he saved a pair of boxing gloves from his last movie, "Million Dollar Baby," just so that he could beat us over the head with this one.

He gives us the rich white woman who is afraid of the scary negroes, oh my. The racist cop. The black man who acts like a white man. The Middle Eastern family that runs a convenience store. The ghetto homies who thieve all around town. It's patently offensive, and lazy, to be preached at about racism and stereotyping when the very people who are doing the preaching are doing the exact thing they're decrying, and doing it with such a somber face. All of it ends up resembling an exercise in middlebrow horse-beating by humdrum dumdum's who wouldn't know racism from flotsam if they were asked to identify both.

The performances leave one with the impression that the actors have been bitten by some pesky bug that implanted the idea that they're making something of incredible importance into their consciousness. They take equal part in the moralizing being done, and gleefully so because it also gives them the perfect opportunity to yell & scream at each other for 100 minutes in some remarkable, if obvious, attempts at Oscar-baiting. How else would one explain Don Cheadle, earnest to the point of unintentional hilarity, uttering such howlers like "I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something"? It's embarrassing. The type of thing one would expect from a film student who was just inspired by Magnolia, completely unaware that even that flick was aped from Robert Altman.

I'm not trashing the movie because it's so brash and because it insists on shoving the "message" down the audiences throat, either. Lars von Trier does that in every one of his movies and I love them. The difference is that he confesses to it almost immediately in his movies, whereas swill like "Crash" tries to be sly and shifty about it, attempting to pass off what you're viewing as realistic and no more preachy than hearing a white man refer to a black man as "nigger" in real life. That's absurd. And crass and self-defeating. Grotesque, actually.

I also must admit that I've been trying very hard not to make a crack about how apt the title of the movie is. I almost succeeded.

Nice to see you again!