THE excited - nay, hysterical - newsreader told us that Crash had "won out over" Brokeback Mountain at the Oscar ceremonies. I wonder what happened to the modest little word "beat"?

Both films have been lauded to the skies, which is fair enough - for we all know no-one ever lost money by underestimating public taste. What does grate, though, is not so much their subject matter but the way they have been described as "cutting edge" and "anti-establishment". But one film is about race relations and the other is a homosexual love affair and I can't think of any two things more right on, trendy and utterly establishment.

The film-maker's blurb for Crash says: "In the grey area between black and white, victim and aggressor, there are no easy answers". So we'll just have to make do with the cliches eh? Brokeback Mountain is a morally uplifting tale of how two cowboys discover the joys of homosexuality and become unfaithful to their wives long term. All right, I understand: the material may be morally suspect, but life itself is morally suspect and it is the duty of the moviemaker to depict life.

Fair enough. But is a nauseously sentimental and hideously kitsch prize-giving ceremony for fashionable movies in a foreign country really so significant that it has to be first item on the news on BBC, ITV and SKY?

Apparently yes. And that tells us all we need to know about our sense of priorities. Even Tessa Jowell's tale of woe was relegated.

Tucked away more obscurely was a brief mention of the fact that talks to resolve the issue of Iran's nuclear processing plants have broken down. As I wrote in this column a few weeks ago, the crisis in Iran is the most dangerous matter to face the western world since the Cuban Missile Crisis 44 years ago.

To recap: Iran is ruled by a President who is a sincere religious fanatic. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared that he wishes to provoke such a crisis as to reveal the so called "hidden Imam" - a part historical, part mythological figure whose appearance is predicted by believers such as Mr Ahmadinejad to herald the Last Battle, the end of the world and the beginning of absolute Islamic rule.

Well, again fair enough. Everybody has a right to his apocalyptic fantasies - just as, I suppose, everybody has a right to make yet more films about marital infidelity and the race relations issue. But with Iran there are other factors which need to be taken into consideration. It may be - let's put it no higher than that - that Iran is making nuclear bombs. This is the Iran which has declared, through Ahmadinejad quite unambiguously, that Israel "has no right to exist and should be wiped off the map".

It may be that he has, or will very soon acquire, the means to do this very thing. I just hope the Americans are not so dispirited by events in Iraq that they will feel unable to deal decisively with Iran. Or do we do nothing and wait until it is too late? Of course the wonderfully potent United Nations and the inspiringly vigorous EU leaders are not doing nothing. In the face of the nuclear threat, they propose banning Iran from taking part in the World Cup. Now that's sure to postpone Armageddon.