I saw the two Oscar favorites, and my own vote goes to Crash.

Rating: 7/10 (7 March 2006)

Brokeback Mountain, in spite of being a gay-themed film, did not move me the way Crash does.
I can think of several possible reasons for this--other than the intrinsic merits of these films. In random order: The accents (I think I did not understand one-third of the dialogue) in BM, its slow pace, and the fact that I have seen enough closeted men up-close so that I look at most of them with a clinical detachment.
Crash is also a tension-filled drama compared to BM's dry love story. The former leaves you with some hope, while BM leaves me, as a gay man, neither seething with anger at the homophobia (too subtle) nor does it make me cry buckets. I am not a fan of violence in film but here it was too fleeting to either hurt or outrage me (the way I was outraged by the violation of a woman's body in Crash). I would instead prefer the docu on the Matthew Shepard case (The Laramie Project).
To me Crash is not just about racial prejudice but also a comment on America's gun culture. I have no knowledge about the situation in the States, but I know that enough discrimination exists on the individual level and there is enough violence involving guns to make them alive issues--they may disappear from the public radar but they do not go away. BM's flag for the gay issue is too underplayed for my liking.