And the award goes to...

So, Oscar results are in and, as usual, I was completely off the markin most of my riskier guesses. Was pleased to be wrong about Wallace and Gromit but was disappointed by failure of History of Violence and Good Night... in the screenplay categories.

Crash's win seemed to take everyone by surprise, and there was a rather depressing story in The Guardian attributing this to the huge amount of money spent by the studio on promotion. My own thinking - for the little it's worth - is along the lines of the Guardian's critic Peter Bradshaw: that the Academy was happy to award prizes to Brokeback Mountain in the more specialist fields of screenplay and directing but were not prepared to recognise it as a film. It's a slight handicap not having seen either movie but from what I can gather Crash is 'radical' and 'controversial' in the politically safe areas of toleration and race relations as opposed to the riskier Brokeback Mountain which not only features homosexual love, but does so without becoming a bleeding-heart 'issue' film.

The problem is that Hollywood likes films that deal with issues, but do so in a relatively simple black-and-white way (excusing the pun). i'm reminded of the difference between Look Who's Coming to Dinner where the plot revolved around Sidney Poitier's race, and The Manchurian Candidate which, if the IMDB is to be believed, featured "the first black actor cast in a part that wasn't specified as a black character." Brokeback Mountain is not a film about homosexuality so much as a love story that just happens to feature two men. The matter-of-factness of this storyline proved too much for the Academy and they went for the safe choice of Crash, which deals with a safe area of debate - 'safe' in the sense that the conclusion (racism is bad) is pretty much universally agreed on in the political mainstream, as opposed to the much more hotly contested subject of the normality and acceptance of homosexuality.

Of course, this reading could be totally off the mark - as I've said I haven't seen either film yet - but I wouldn't be surprised if people look back at the results of this supposedly heavily politicised Oscars and see a more conservative result than may have been hoped for.