Free Republic

A by-the-book warden pulled the plug during a jailhouse showing of the controversial gay-cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain” yesterday, fearing the film’s steamy scenes violated the facility’s no-movie-sex policy. Faster than you could say “I wish I knew how to quit you,” inmates at MCI-Norfolk found their afternoon matinee ended just 10 minutes before the Academy Award-winning movie’s ending. The cons were assembled in the gym yesterday afternoon to watch the film about a love affair between two gay cowboys and their trysts on an isolated mountainside - that is, until a prison official shut it off. However, the prisoners did...

Despite all the predictions of huge success for the gay cowboy film, Brokeback Mountain, it was the rather less-hyped Crash - a comment on race relations in the United States - which picked up the most significant Oscar, best movie. The 78th Academy Awards at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre featured the usual array of 'A' list stars in designer outfits along with 300 fans who'd won tickets for a place along the red carpet. McCarthy witch-hunts George Clooney was expected to be one of the biggest winners, after his film Good Night and Good Luck was nominated for six Oscars. The...

Given that it's Oscar time, I nominate the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Bunch of Hypocrites. That’s because this year’s dirty little secret is the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain. For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it’s shameful that Hollywood’s homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson’s. Despite the hype you’re reading in the press and on the Internet about Brokeback, with its eight nominations, being the supposed favorite to take home the Best Picture Oscar on March 5, Crash could...

The ensemble drama "Crash" pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Academy Awards history, winning best picture Sunday over the cowboy romance "Brokeback Mountain," which had been the front-runner. "Crash," featuring a huge cast in crisscrossing story lines over a chaotic 36-hour period in Los Angeles, rode a late surge of praise that lifted it past "Brokeback Mountain," a film that had won most other key Hollywood honors. In a year of provocative films at the Oscars, "Crash" was one of the fiercest, a portrait of simmering racial and cultural tension among blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians and Arabs. The...