Driving Miss Daisy beating Do the Right Thing for best picture

Of course, quality has seldom mattered when it comes to the Oscars. The awards are chosen based on a number of mitigating factors, from industry connections to subject matter to contemporary political issues and much more. Crash, which did have its fair share of critical acclaim, was a blunter and more easy to digest film for some Academy members. Its take on racial tensions in Los Angeles was tailored more towards pleasing white audiences, and the Academy, even today, remains heavily white. It was a film full of notable actors, which probably encouraged a lot of votes from other actors, who make up the largest demographic of the Academy. Moreover, Crash felt “safe” in a way Brokeback Mountain was not. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times suggested that Crash benefitted from the Academy's ingrained homophobia. Even at its most progressive, they just weren’t ready to celebrate a film like Brokeback Mountain. For many, it felt like a rejection of progress and cemented the Academy’s status as an out-of-date institution, a problem it’s still fighting with today. In the Academy's preferential voting system, that means the amenable Crash won out.

Conventional wisdom at the time said that director Ang Lee’s Western about two men and their tortured, unfulfilled love was destined to win. For proof, watch the YouTube clip of Oscar presenter and unflappable man Jack Nicholson decidedly flap after he reads the name of the upset winner.What’s undeniable is that in early 2006, more people in a nearly 6,000-member voting body thought that Crash was the superior film. And while Brokeback was weaving through the zeitgeist, Crash was not without its own supporters. In October 2005, Oprah Winfrey invited the cast onto her show after she had shared the story of her own “Crash moment,” when an Hermès clerk in Paris reportedly denied her entrance to the store. That December, Roger Ebert named it the best movie of the year. (Brokeback was his No. 5 pick.) Then, after the Screen Actors Guild nominated Crashfor best ensemble, Lionsgate sent consumer DVDs to every SAG member. The strategy worked: Crash won, beating Brokeback. “The one thing I saw was that actors seemed to be on our side,” says Crash producer Cathy Schulman. “SAG had gone well, and it was clear that the acting community was really pushing for us.”

Ossana, who also served as a producer on Brokeback, saw other signs of shifting winds in the race that suggested members just weren’t seeing her movie. Two weeks before the Oscars, Crash director Paul Haggis hosted a party for nominees. When Ossana discovered that Clint Eastwood, the director of Unforgiven — one of her favorite movies — was in attendance, Haggis offered to introduce her. But on the way over to the Western icon, Haggis stopped. There was something Ossana should know: Eastwood hadn’t seen Brokeback. “It was like someone punched me in the stomach,” Ossana says. “You would think being a filmmaker, you would want to see every film. It’s what you do. The fact that he hadn’t seen it, it was kind of like, ‘I see.'” (When asked to confirm Ossana’s story, Eastwood did not respond.)

The conventional wisdom was that Academy members weren't quite ready to bestow their highest honor upon a movie featuring a man-on-man-in-pup-tent love scene. In an attempt to right the wrongs of Oscar history, THR mounted a recount in 2015, polling hundreds of Academy members on a number of disputed decisions. That time, Brokeback won in a landslide.

Did the Hollywood-centric themes of race and isolation in Crash, along with a cast stocked with likable actors and actresses such as Matt Dillon and Sandra Bullock, cause Los Angeles-dwelling Academy members to favor the movie?” SFGate questioned immediately following the win. “Did the almost unending media drumbeat for Brokeback Mountain cause the film to peak in Academy voting-member popularity too early, a scenario exactly opposite that of 2005 winner Million Dollar Baby, which quietly slipped into theaters in December and benefited from a concentrated barrage of last-minute hype? — Or is Hollywood really not as liberal as the right-wingers make it out to be, but instead filled with aging Academy voters who just weren’t ready to support a love story about two gay men?” Said love story famously featured Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist and the late Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar. Then still a boundary-pushing movie despite the recent year, Brokeback made headlines for its sex scene and its deep portrayal of an intimate same-sex relationship. “Sometimes you win by losing, and nothing has proved what a powerful, taboo-breaking, necessary film Brokeback Mountain was more than its loss Sunday night to Crash in the Oscar best picture category,” wrote the Los Angeles Times at the time. “Despite all the magazine covers it graced, despite all the red-state theaters it made good money in, despite (or maybe because of) all the jokes late-night talk show hosts made about it, you could not take the pulse of the industry without realizing that this film made a number of people distinctly uncomfortable… In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who’ve led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed Brokeback Mountain.”