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As films, both Brokeback and the George Clooney film are self-conscious creations: both want to convert.
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The Academy vote is like a political leadership election: they don't always like doing what they're supposed to do. But there's surely something more subtle at work here. True enough on many levels - though to cry foul over heavy marketing is pushing it, especially as every film has been shoving out glossy brochures and taking out full-page trade-paper magazine ads for at least a couple of months. An easy pill to swallow, and Hollywood swallowed it - helped, of course, by a huge campaign. Its got enough liberal credentials, in that it tries to show how everyone is victim of and to cultural stereotyping. Crash is an LA film, about LA people and LA neuroses. So what have they got? Current wisdom says that, by turning away from Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck, the Academy is displaying its innate conservatism, backing off from the radical political statement that Oscar commentators have been talking up since the nominations were announced. The Academy must just really like his films. And yet, the stark truth is that Crash and Million Dollar Baby both won accolades for best picture, not just for their star performances. Even the well-publicised car-jacking incident that sparked off his desire to write Crash sounds like the sort of inspiration John Q Hack brings to screenwriting class.
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A Canadian in his mid-50s with a long career writing and producing TV shows (including Thirtysomething), there's nothing in his background to predict this achievement. Haggis the man is something of an anomaly. The question is, can you bottle it and sell it on eBay? The director of Crash, and before that the writer of Million Dollar Baby, Haggis has won, for himself and his collaborators, a staggering total of seven Oscars with his first two films. Because it's now clear that whatever that secret thing is that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences wants, Paul Haggis has it in spades. halo? A new Hollywoodism may have to be coined.