Author Stephen King says he knew Brokeback Mountain wasn't going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. “Brokeback is about enduring love and fierce sexual attraction between two men,” he writes in his latest Entertainment Weekly column. “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, at bottom as conservative as the current U.S. House of Representatives, gave Ang Lee one Oscar (which surprised me), the writing team of McMurtry and Diana Ossana another...and with those bones thrown, felt free to move on.”

King is hardly the only one to express the idea that the movie industry isn't nearly as tolerant as it claims, or as its right-wing critics insist. Call it the backlash against the backlash, but by naming Crash as the upset winner of the Best Picture award, many critics are suggesting that Hollywood has committed its biggest blunder in years, or perhaps ever.

Over at MSNBC.com, the headline on their latest Oscar article reads, “Crash and Burn:
The Academy takes yet another step toward irrelevance with its latest pick.”

Ouch!

A Google search turns up dozens of similar articles, all wondering how a movie like Crash with so many mediocre reviews, a middling box-office take, and a paucity of awards could have won Best Picture, especially over Brokeback Mountain, which, Academy Awards aside, may very well be the most honored film of all time.

Other articles point out how laughable the idea is that Hollywood has ever had a
pro-gay agenda.

“Gay actors can't even come out of the closet,” says Gene Stone at YahooNews. “Gay executives and agents stay in the closet. There isn't a more closeted business in the country, except, perhaps, the National Football League.”

Hollywood's self-congratulatory claim of tolerance is now being challenged more than ever before. During Sunday's awards ceremony, George Clooney lauded the Academy for having long been “out of touch” with mainstream American on issues of social justice. But in fact, Hollywood often produces and honors social justice films long after society itself has resolved the issue in question.

Mainstream Hollywood didn't address AIDS in film until Philadelphia, in 1993, ten years into the epidemic when much AIDS-phobia had subsided. Gandhi won Best Picture in 1982, after Gandhi himself had been dead for more than thirty years. Schindler's List won nearly fifty years after the Holocaust. The Hollywood establishment is often “progressive” only after it's very safe to be.

There are, of course, individuals in Hollywood who are very progressive on current social issues. Clooney is one, as are other conservative whipping boys such as Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, and others. But such individual progressives exist in
any industry.

Brokeback Mountain's loss to Crash, a movie about racial intolerance, only serves to underscore the point that, when it comes to current hot-button issues, Hollywood often gets cold feet. After all, which issue most divides the country right now: civil rights for racial minorities, or civil rights for gays? There are, of course, no states that are currently trying to ban inter-racial marriage, inter-racial adoption, or to remove racial minorities from anti-discrimination protection. Yet all of those battles are currently being waged against gays and lesbians all across the country.

WHAT COMES NEXT
Some Brokeback Mountain fans aren't taking the Best Picture loss lying down. Since the shock of Sunday night, the anger and indignation has been palpable. (Meanwhile, folks were celebrating the defeat over at the right wing website, Freerepublic.com.)

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