'Crash' grabs Oscar, topping 'Brokeback'
LOS ANGELES — "Brokeback Mountain" was the talk of the Academy Awards at the beginning of Sunday night's ceremony, but "Crash" took off with the ultimate prize in the end.
The ensemble racial drama about disparate Los Angeles residents whose lives collide over a 36-hour period was the surprise best-picture winner over the heavily favored "Brokeback Mountain," about cowboys who fall in love in Wyoming in the 1960s.
"Crash," with a huge, eclectic cast that includes Terrence Howard, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle and rapper Ludacris, also earned Oscars for original screenplay and film editing.
"Capote" star Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best-actor award for immersing himself so deeply into the role of Truman Capote that you felt as if you were actually watching the author at work.
Reese Witherspoon underwent intensive music and vocal lessons to take the stage as country legend June Carter in "Walk the Line," and walked away with the best-actress Oscar.
"Brokeback Mountain" did earn a best-director prize for Ang Lee, making him the first Asian filmmaker to achieve that honor. The film also earned Oscars for Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana's adapted screenplay and for original score.
But in recent weeks there's been talk of a possible "Brokeback" backlash, perhaps because it was so obviously the odds-on favorite, and "Crash" seemed to be creeping up from behind.
"We were so shocked," director and co-writer Paul Haggis said afterward backstage. "I'm still trying to figure out if we actually got this."
Standing alongside Haggis, who wrote the script with Bobby Moresco, producer Cathy Schulman said she was grateful that the academy had honored a movie "about love, about tolerance, about truth."
"We are humbled by the other nominees in this category," Schulman said. "You have made this year one of the most breathtaking and stunning maverick years in American cinema."
Other best-picture nominees also had heavy themes: "Munich," about the aftermath of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics; "Good Night, and Good Luck," about newsman Edward R. Murrow's on-air battles with Sen. Joseph McCarthy; and "Capote," about Truman Capote's work on the groundbreaking true-crime novel "In Cold Blood."
Rachel Weisz, who had won every imaginable award leading up to the Oscars, took the supporting-actress prize for "The Constant Gardener," in which she plays a feisty young woman who's killed for trying to expose medical corruption in Kenya.Clooney was more political than Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," in accepting his supporting-actor Oscar for "Syriana." The former People magazine's "sexiest man alive" famously gained 35 pounds to play a veteran CIA officer in the complex global thriller.In responding to complaints that there's a disconnect between the Hollywood establishment and the tastes of mainstream America, Clooney said he was proud to be part of that."We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing. We're the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular," he said. "And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters."Peter Jackson's three-hour epic remake of "King Kong" snatched three Oscars, for visual effects, sound mixing and sound editing. The visually lush "Memoirs of a Geisha" also took three awards, for cinematography, costume design and art direction.The show had its fair share of light moments, too, despite the intense subject matter of many of the nominated films.The French filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning documentary feature "March of the Penguins" carried giant penguin plush toys onstage. Nick Park and Steve Box, the makers of "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," accepted their awards for best animated feature dressed in tuxedoes and matching rainbow-striped bow ties.And, of course, there was the much-anticipated performance of "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" from "Hustle & Flow," the surprise winner in the original song category. Dancers dressed as hookers and pimps gyrated on stage as one of the film's co-stars, Taraji Henson, belted out the song's signature hook which had been sanitized. to include the word "witches" instead of a word that sounds similar.Stewart joked afterward that the members of Three 6 Mafia, who performed the insanely catchy rap song, were "going to get into it with Itzhak Perlman's posse."But the Memphis rappers behaved like proper Oscar winners as they accepted their awards. They remembered to thank their moms — and Jesus, of course.
