The film is ... different and I can very much see how someone would not like it. The strange thing is if the same film were made of, say, a fictional Communist in a Nazi death camp, it would have been a runaway choice, I think. It was an artistic film, as another poster said, and -- had it been unsuccessful in America, particularly "red" America -- would have been a popular Oscar choice. Award winning films do not have to be entertaining, they just have to have superior artistic merit. It should do something different.
We'll see. If Passion gets snubbed for all awards, even technical ones, I think we can chalk it up to bias. I'm sure that the Academy probably tends to want to avoid controversy after having Hollywood hit so hard this past year. We'll see how M. Moore does.