Oscar Alert
The Academy has spoken and the big Oscars went to:
Best Picture: Crash
Best Director: Ang Lee
Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman
Best Original Screenplay: Crash
Best Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain
Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney
Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz
Whole list here. Discuss the winners and losers–and how Jon Stewart did as host (pretty good, I thought, though it sounded like he was bombing like Dresden there).
Update: "Gays brokenhearted over 'Brokeback' loss," reports the San Fran Chronicle from that city's "premier Oscar night party." The reaction in part to Crash taking home Best Pic honors?
"I think that's an absolute horror," said Brad Bruner, who is a leader in the Golden State Gay Rodeo Association. "It's an outright sign of homophobia in our country. ('Crash') won no awards before this. It makes me sick."
Whole thing here.
Crash is the "worst movie of the year," say lefties. Before it took home anything, Angeleno deluxe Matt Welch pooh-poohed its LA cred, saying films like it tell "us far more about the neuroses of their directors–and the prejudices of academy voters" than about America's second-largest city.
The Arab press seems philosophical about the failure of the suicide-bomber flick Paradise Now to take home the Oscar for best foreign language film. Perhaps because Munich, somehow reviled both by supporters of Israel and Palestinians, got shut out. And perhaps because Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World fizzled faster than Richard Reid's shoes at Western box offices.
