The greatest competitor of Brokeback Mountain deserved its Oscar for Best Picture.

Rating: 7/10 (31 August 2007)

Like every year, 5 strong Oscar nominees for Best Picture of the Oscars of 2006: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck and Munich. Although they both are terrific movies, Capote and Good Night and Good Luck had too strong contestants to win the Oscar for best Picture. They had great stories but the stories of the other 3 nominees are still stronger. But they deserved to be nominated of course, and Philip Seymour Hoffman earned his Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role. The nominees for that Oscar were alright, although I'd rather seen Eric Bana nominated for Munich instead of Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain. But that's just my opinion.
So there were 3 movies left to be Best Picture: Brokeback Mountain, Crash and Munich. Although Munich is an incredible and terrific movie by all means, it couldn't measure up to Brokeback Mountain and Crash because of their interesting and exceptional stories. Sometimes fiction beats reality and history when it deals with an amazing subject. And this year we have that situation.
So actually the greatest 'battle' was between Brokeback Mountain and Crash. And the reason why Crash won, is because the concept of racism is still more intriguing than homosexuality. 'Love is a force of nature' was the strong tag-line of Brokeback Mountain, and although the movie is as good as it can be, the masterpiece of Paul Haggis took over. Crash deals with such a fascinating subject. The collision of a group of people who are facing racism and who are in some way connected to each other. Each story of every man or woman in that film is as intriguing as the concept of the whole movie itself. And the cast is absolutely great. They all have supporting roles, and every role is just as good as the other ones. Matt Dillon did great and deserved to be nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Maybe Sandra Bullock deserved to be nominated too, but apparently she had too little votes to be in the top 5. I'm pretty sure they considered her to be nominated though. And of course the rest of the cast is fabulous: Brendan Fraser, Michael Peña, Ryan Phillippe, Terrence Howard,  very well done.
Crash also delivers a big scale message about racism, and I actually felt different after seeing the movie. Not that I am a racist, I definitely am not, but it gets to you anyway. I hope a lot of people have already seen this movie and a lot of people will see it. It will always be remembered as the greatest film of 2005-2006.