"Crash took top picture and Ang Lee wins best director!
3/5/2006
Hollywood- 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 large
cast of "Crash" includes supporting-actor nominee-winner Matt Dillon, Don
Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Chris
"Ludacris" Bridges, Jennifer Esposito and Ryan Phillippe.
Ang
Lee won the Academy Award as best director Sunday for the cowboy romance "Brokeback
Mountain," becoming the first Asian to win Hollywood's top honor for filmmakers.
Adept at genres from Westerns to historical romance to martial-arts pageants,
Lee won his Oscar for a purely American story about two men tragically swept up
in a gay romance that they conceal from their families for two decades. Born in
Taiwan, Lee first came to Hollywood's notice with the romantic charmers "The
Wedding Banquet" and "Eat Drink Man Woman," which earned back-to-back Oscar
nominations for foreign-language film for 1993 and '94. Since then, Lee has been
a chameleon. He made the Jane Austen costume romance "Sense and Sensibility," a
best-picture nominee, the stark American drama "The Ice Storm," the Western
"Ride With the Devil" and the martial-arts epic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon," which won the Oscar for foreign-language film five years ago.
