It's hype, it's Hollywood~ nothing has changed except the limits the public has chosen as a whole to accept and venture beyond~ I mean, It's like a car wreck~ people slow down to see what's goin' down, especially if someone screams, 'OH MY GOD, A WRECK!!!!' and when you get to it, it's nothing but a fender bender~ no dead people~ no blood~ you drove 8 blocks out of your way to see it, and no big deal~ same with Brokeback Mountain~

It's not something you see every day. This is the first movie put 'out' there with 2 guys rolling around in the tumbleweeds, and in fact, it was going nowhere at first, until theaters were banning its showing~ then the hype started, and it was a Hollywood experiment gone aBling~ follow me here......

Universal didn't plug the movie that much~ only in very selected cities. How often does that happen with a picture company of that magnitude? Not often. They didn't know how the general public was going to handle two guys goin' at it~ and cowboys at that.......unless you were a fan already of one of the actors, had stock in the flick, or kept up on the filming, you really didn't hear anything about the film until someone said, "Hey, they made a movie about 2 gay cowboys. hahaha~" and BAM~ instant banning, and the spinning PR machine was then rolling with enough speed, that it turned into that car wreck mentioned above~ someone at Universal was either very aprehensive, very smart, or a conglomeration of the two~

AND, if you think about it, Heath Ledger was also watching his a$$ too........remember the flick that came out immediately after Brokeback? Yes, Casanova~ the manly movie about a guy who had to be with 45 women a day or something of the sort~ "Heath Ledger plays the fabled romantic as a man who, after failing to win the affection of a particular Venetian woman, strives to discover the real meaning of love."~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~his agent was smart on this, too~ ya know, in case Brokeback failed miserably, he didn't want that lingering out there on his resume' while he was filming something else. The film company didn't want that either~ Ledger is too much coin in the bank to have him known as the "that guy in the gay cowboy movie~ hahaha" by the public.

Ledger said in an interview that when he read the script, it was just such good writing, that he was very interested in doing it~ this time, it paid off. Many good scripts that have been put on the big screen have failed with good intent in mind~

Hollywood eats that stuff up~ we all know that.....the old saying is so true here~ even bad PR is.........good PR.

The only way Claire was going to get any recognition is if she put on a mustache, and pretended to be guy who stumbled across the Brokeback boys around the night time campfire, hoping for a threesome~

Every year, excellent acting performances get overlooked. It's part of the whole game. It's SAG's version of Payola~