Lav, I'm going to watch BBM this weekend, don't know when I'll be able to see the Crash, but have you seen Crash by any chance?

I still think Academy really liked BBM with 8 nominations, giving nods to the movies most people haven't seen based on political/social motives. They are more than ready for these themes. If you look at the awards, you see that the screenplay for both movies won, one of them being original screen play, the other adapted from a book. However with a best director award against a best editing award, I really couldn't say which one would win the best picture. I guess the brevity won the reward. Or Maybe Academy gave the final nod to Crash only because of the present atmosphere in the US and the tensions in the past years.

I'm not sure what this movie is about, but I've to tell you, it is not a good feeling being a Middle-Eastern/Arab right now in the US. Living in the South for a while, I've seen the discrimination against African American is also well and alive. Some people literally move out of a neighborhood because some African Americans have just moved in. Even African Americans try to stick together, like in the Church, they try to sit in a few rows up in the balcony or in the back and most of them don't feel like mixing in the crowd, doing discrimination against themselves or others(?).

This might be the problem only in an almost small town like Birmingham AL., but it is far from being a solved issue everywhere. I think, they felt that this would give this movie a chance to be seen by more people, while BBM is already a controversial movie and will be seen by many people with 8 nominations and three wins.

Just my two baseless cents.