A great night comes crashing down

It was such a good Oscar night. Jon Stewart was funny. Several fun surprises, like the "Pimp" song getting Best Song. Great dinner. Good company. Nobody undeserving getting any acting Oscars. Life was good.

And then, it had to end with shit. I thought Jack had to be joking when he said "Crash" had won Best Picture. He even looked apologetic, like "I'm just reading what's on the card, people, don't blame me." The people involved with the picture couldn't believe it either. Paul Haggis jumped up totally surprised. He knew what should have happened...

Let me just say, for the record, that "Crash" was an overrated mess of a movie. To steal my good friend Amanda's metaphor, it was "Higher Learning" (a melodramatic race film from the 90s) for adults. Add to it a lot of the faux significance of coincidence that you had in "Magnolia," and there's "Crash." Melodramatic, annoying, overly precious, and generally predictable (Bridget got mad at me a couple of times because I laughed at the movie during several of the supposedly tense dramatic moments...). Bad. Bad, bad, bad. I was pissed that this self-important crapfest even got nominated over something worthy like "Walk the Line," but this... this....

At least with other ridiculous picks of the past (e.g., "Forrest Gump" in '94), we kind of knew it was coming. But in this case, it came out of fucking nowhere. Ang Lee won director, and the movie won Adapted Screenplay. It looked like a lock. "Brokeback Mountain," a beautiful, emotional masterpiece, deserved Best Picture like few movies in the past several years have, and instead it got shafted by a crappy little feel-good race picture set in Los Angeles (and you know damn well that's what put it over the top).

And so... another undeserving movie gets the top nod. C'est la vie. It has been a fun night though; good food, good friends, lots of wine, lots of fun. Just one really bad note at the end. There's always next year...

But, really, "Brokeback Mountain" got assfucked without so much as a dollop of spit for lube.