Sexuality versus Race: 'Brokeback Mountain' versus 'Crash'

Roger Ebert thinks that Crash will (and should) win the Academy Award for Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain. MadProfessah thinks this is another example of race and sexuality being placed in oppositional ideological stances to each other.

I finally saw Halle Berry's Introducing Dorothy Dandridge this week and it highlighted for me the significance of the Best Actress and Best Actor Academy Awards going to African Americans (Halle Berry for Monster's Ball and Denzel Washington for Training Day in 2002. I had not realized that Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black woman to be nominated for an Oscar and what a huge star she should have been/could have been/was. Her contemporaries (and equivalents) were Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe! But the zenith of her stardom was 1954's Carmen Jones and the immediate aftermath which was right in the middle of the "good old days" of the racially segregated 1950s. Clearly, America and more specifically Hollywood, which acts as both a mirror and a microcosm of society's values, have made advances in racial understanding since then. But what about in the area of sexuality?

There have been no Oscar wins by openly gay or lesbian actors in recent memory although both Jodie Foster (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs) and Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects, American Beauty) have won twice each. Openly gay actor Sir Ian Mckellen has been nominated twice but not yet won. Numerous avowedly heterosexual actors have won Oscars for playing gay or transgendered individuals (William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider-Woman, Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry, Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Greg Kinnear in As Good As It Gets). This year Felicity Huffman in Transamerica is nominated for playing a male-to-female pre-op transsexual.

So, the ramifications of which movie wins (Crash or Brokeback Mountain) will be perceived as evidence of which issue is more salient to Academy voters (and by extension the entire American film going public): race or sexual orientation. The problem with treating the issues of race and sexuality as two distinct, discrete concepts is that it elides instances where race and sexuality intersect: namely Black gay men, Asian lesbians, Latino transexuals et cetera. But then again Hollywood hasn't really been doing a great job of representing these groups in popular media! And this is the crux of my argument, the distillation of multifaceted works of art like Brokeback Mountain and Crash to simply a pissing match scored by which privileged Hollywood insider takes home a gold statuette on Sunday night in Los Angeles does a disservice to anyone interested in either (or both) of these issues.