The evening rolled along smoothly enough. Host Jon Stewart delivered some delicious political zingers, movie stars showed off their couture, and Oscar winners delivered gracious speeches at the 2006 Academy Awards in early March.

Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's beautifully scenic film, seemed dead on to break new boundaries by contending for the Best Picture of the Academy Awards with its tale of two cowboys who harbor a deep love for each other while hiding it from their families and the world.

And so, when in the late hours of the evening the show finally wound up with what seemed to be an afterthought of awarding the Best Picture, all the nominees seemed calmly resigned to Brokeback taking the golden statue. Indeed, the whole world seemed to wait with bated breath for this "little picture that could" to get the big prize and thus truly legitimize Hollywood's and the movie-watching public's acceptance of gay-themed movies.

But it was Paul Haggis's brilliant ensemble film, Crash, that broke up the party by winning the award for Best Picture. The film's win was perhaps the biggest upset since Shakespeare in Love grabbed the prize away from Saving Private Ryan in 1995.

Passing On a Message Through Crash? 

How did Crash steal away Brokeback Mountain's Oscar thunder? Was it really a better movie? Were the voters in the Academy quietly making the statement that in the private settings of their own homes, where they could vote for what they really felt, that they just couldn't put the stamp of approval on a movie that had gay themes? Or was Crash really a better movie?

An article on CNN.com put forth the idea that perhaps the Academy was indeed uncomfortable with the themes of Brokeback Mountain. It also stated that perhaps it really wasn't the great movie that it was hyped up to be. Film critic Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times that "you could not take the pulse of the industry without realizing that this film made people distinctly uncomfortable.

"In the privacy of the voting booth ... people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed Brokeback Mountain," Turan wrote.

All the movies nominated for Best Picture in 2005 strove to make relevant statements — whether about explosive racial and intercultural relationships (Crash), forbidden homosexual love (Brokeback Mountain), the depths a writer will go to for his work (Capote), an era of rampant government suspicion (Good Night and Good Luck), or even the human side of the violence between Palestinians and Israelis (Munich).

As far as Hollywood was concerned, 2005 was the year for movies with a social conscious, movies that weren't blockbusters, but that rather tried to make the audience uncomfortable by asking them to think.

Certainly Crash with its multiple interlocking storylines that crisscrossed through Los Angeles' numerous ethnicities, set out to do an ambitious thing — it highlighted the pitfalls of intolerance by showing how people of different races and social circles cannot avoid clashing against each other.

Whatever the reason, the Academy Awards seemed to draw a line of demarcation by choosing Crash as the final winner. Brokeback Mountain won in a number of other key categories, including best adapted screenplay and Best Director for Lee.

It was almost as if Hollywood was saying that though it accepts gay-themed films (even Capote, another best picture contender, told the story of journalist-writer Truman Capote, who was also a closet homosexual), you need to do more than bank on momentum and simple love themes to win the Best Picture prize.

Sometimes a beautiful love story is enough to take the prize away from other films with grittier subject matters, as Shakespeare in Love did. But other times love just isn't enough, whether gay or straight, to win it all. And of course, for the Muslim movie-watching public, a win for Crash was certainly welcome due to the well-known religious forbiddance of homosexuality.

Moving Away from Crashes Yet With Mustapha al-Akkad

And though Crash's win at the very end was the huge story of the night, for me perhaps the best part of this year's Oscars was when the standard tribute was paid to those movie-industry people who had passed away during the last year.

Mustapha al-Akkad's The Message, the beautifully filmed biography of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him)

As the silver screen honored movie stars, directors, producers, and cinematographers who had died in 2005, suddenly filmmaker Mustapha al-Akkad's name and face popped up, with his groundbreaking Islamic-themed film, The Message, framed behind him. Akkad, who died in the terrorist hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan last fall, was known in Hollywood for his popular Halloween horror movie series.

But to the rest of the world, he was known for The Message, the beautifully filmed biography of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) that traced the Prophet's life without ever showing his image. And that the Oscars chose to showcase this movie of his when his name and face was shown was indicative of an intelligent movie industry that realized the great loss of a man who acted as a bridge between the Muslim world and the West.

It was but a few seconds in nearly four-hour show, but it was an appropriate gesture of acknowledgment to one of the Muslim world's best filmmakers.