In his post on the Berlin Film Festiva’s jury prizes, the bulk of which were handed out on Saturday night, David Hudson predicted that some of the selections “will not sit well with many of the people I spoke with or the critics I read throughout the festival,” and man, was he right. The Golden Bear went to The Elite Squad (or Tropa de Elite), Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha’s action drama about drugs and military police in mid-90s Rio, and to say that this film was not a critical favorite would be an understatement.

Noting that the “overwhelming ugliness of [The Elite Squad] has stayed with me,” Shane Danielson at indieWIRE was one of many to cite the film’s “genuinely fascist sensibility…Since when did Mike Huckabee start scripting action-thrillers?” And that was published before the award was announced––Jurgen Fauth’s post on the matter seems to sum up the thoughts of many in the wake of the announcement: “From where I’m sitting over a Hefeweizen, the Berlinale’s top award couldn’t have gone to a worse film.”

So why, and how, did it happen? Filmbrain is calling conspiracy:

Easily the worst film in competition, this ultra right-wing (bordering on fascist) Police actioner set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro had nothing going for it, except for its pushy American distributor, Harvey Weinstein. It wasn’t long after the awards last night that SMS messages were flying fast and furious about how Weinstein had somehow bought the award. Perhaps that’s something we all needed to believe, for how else were we to process that a critically panned film could walk away with top honors, especially when it was up against such lauded works as There Will Be Blood or Happy-Go-Lucky?

You’ll remember that just after the festival began, two jury members resigned, under not necessarily mysterious, but certainly curiously coincidental circumstances. Is it possible that they chose to leave rather than promise a prize to a film they deemed unworthy? Maybe it’s a paranoid line of reasoning, but wouldn’t it be naive to think that film festival juries are impervious to the irregularities that haunt pretty much every other type of vote? And seriously––you didn’t really buy that line about Harvey hiding out in domestic bliss, did you?