After “Brokeback Mountain” lost out to “Crash” last night for Best Pic honors, “Brokeback” screenwriter Larry McMurtry was quoted as saying, “Perhaps the truth really is, Americans don’t want cowboys to be gay.” And he wasn’t the only one implying that “Brokeback” offered too much man-love for Oscar.

Academy voters—said to be the blue-haired moms of the eligible, but too busy, actual ballot holders–do trend more conservative than Hollywood as a whole, but we’ll never know for certain if anti-gay sentiment had a hand in the surprise ending last night. All the same, was “Crash” producer Cathy Schulman wisest to thank the Academy “for embracing our film about love and about tolerance, about truth” when the suspicion is out there that intolerance cost “Brokeback”—a movie about love and tolerance—the Oscar?