Tonight NBC airs the increasingly irrelevant Golden Globes, prefatory to the announcement of Oscar nominations on January 31. There’s a lot of talk suggesting Brokeback Mountain is a sure Oscar winner, but I have to dissent. The picture to beat is Crash, the highly praised series of vignettes about racial strife in Los Angeles that should have been called “the feel-bad movie of the year.” There’s a great inside story about Crash — how its director, Paul Haggis, had a heart attack midway through shooting but returned to finish it — and because it’s a deadly serious look at how America is racist, because it’s an L.A. story and because it was actually a huge hit at the box office, making $56 million on a budget of $6.5 million, it will charge ahead of the “gay cowboy movie” and take the statue on March 5.
The only sure thing this year is that Reese Witherspoon will win best actress for Walk the Line.