What I find really sad is that a great writer like Annie Proulx has gotten so emotionally invested in the Hollywood system that she actually started to believe that (a) Brokeback had a chance to win an Oscar and that (b) winning an Oscar means something important to artistic integrity. The Best Picture Oscar ALWAYS goes to a piece of crap, and almost always to a sanctimonious piece of crap. That's what it's FOR. She should drag her ass back to Montana and write some more books.

Yeah, her rage is kinda from outer space, but cut her some slack. Proulx comes from a world where artistic merit plays a legitimate role in awards and acclaim, and being thrown into the world of the Oscars—where the sentence "And the winner of the Best Picture Oscar is...Forrest Gump!" is factual—must have been jarring as shit...

What is from outer space is her delusion that the Independent Spirit Awards are any more merit-based.

I find it disconcerting that Proulx attributes the film's failure to win Best Picture to the fact that the decision was made by academy voters living "cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates." A frighteningly similar argument is used by the right to explain how films like Brokeback Mountain get made in the first place. So which is it? Is Hollywood so hopelessly out of step with mainstream American culture that the industry failed to understand that Brokeback would never gain popular support outside of marginalized liberal circles? Or is Hollywood so hopelessly out of step with mainsteam American culture that they failed to understand how much support there is throughout the nation for big-screen representations of attractive, sympathetic gay characters? Or are both sides of the debate so determined to focus on what's wrong with *Hollywood* that they ignore a more significant debate about what is (or isn't) wrong with the country as a whole?

I like her channeling Joan Didion's "Play It As It Lays" skewering of Hollywood, but does anyone besides Proulx think that racial conflict is so "yesterday" in L.A.? I know there have been fewer riots in Montana, of course.

gimme a fuckin' break -- her rant in pathetic. she's been wildly successful in her career and seems to feel that the world owes her every possible award and accolade. you don't see heath ledger pitching a fit.
maybe brokeback got shafted at the academy awards but COME ON. crash was hardly 'trash.' it was a lot better than that enormously dull 'shitting news.' and no, i don't give a fuck how many copies the book sold. it was a slow, sentimental piece of crap.