It's not that he didn't like BBM, but both he and his partner Roeper got on a "Crash" high not long before the voting ended and started saying how they thought it should be the one to get the Oscar. I've never forgiven them for that. Maybe they succumbed to the politics of it all, I don't know. I still hold that any critic worth his salt had to be nuts to look at both of those pictures and decide that BBM wasn't the superior film.
I generally respect Roger Ebert and don't think he seems the type to be swayed by politics (though some say that his wife being black may have had something to do with it). I just think that in this particular case, he went a little crazy.
Most if not all of the film critics I like go crazy from time to time. In a couple of cases, this even involved
Brokeback Mountain. Stephanie Zacharek of
Salon -- a good critic and normally fairly reliable -- actually gave it a mediocre review.
I guess I'm not that surprised if I liked
Gran Torino and some critic didn't. In the case of BBM, it seems particularly shocking -- how could they fail to appreciate the best movie in the history of cinema? But oh well. If I like the critic otherwise, I just try to forget about it.