They felt like the movies surge had come and gone. It was already on the downhill slide of popularity and buzz.
I'm not so sure about this.
Crash had been released and left the theaters for almost a year when the Awards ceremony rolled around, while
Brokeback was still in quite a few theaters (but not for much longer), and Brokeback fever was, if anything, still picking up steam then (though I don't think the wider public recognized what a remarkable phenomenon was developing with this).
Lots of folks have speculated that
Crash ended up winning to a large degree because it was an L.A. story, populated with L.A. characters, portrayed by a whole slew of more-or-less well-known L.A. actors (there were some exceptions to this, of course, Thandie Newton being one). It seemed like a case of local folks rooting for the home team.
Be that as it may, some Academy members were shockingly open about their homophobia (I remember Ernest Borgnine being one of them), and I just had a gut feeling the next day that homophobia had played a role in the results. It certainly felt like an insult to Ennis and Jack's love and everything that represented.