“One of the debates that comes up every award season is over the merit of Crash as a Best Picture winner. Actually, it isn’t so much a debate as it is people saying it shouldn’t have happened. I agree. Though I haven’t seen either in a while, I still consider myself to be on team Brokeback Mountain. Unfortunately, it was just a little too soon for the Academy to have made such a “”progressive”” choice. Instead, they went for the more cliche one.
At the time, my argument against Crash was pretty simple. Ignoring everything else about the film, what stood out to me is that it was trying to do the same interconnected vignette thing that Magnolia did. Magnolia was infinitely better in many respects, not the least of which being that the connections didn’t feel gimmicky or contrived. Anderson at least got a screenplay nod for his brilliant script, but it’s not fair that Haggis’ script got the win.
It was only later that I realized just how contrived this film is. It’s trying to make a statement about racism, but does it by having their multicolored cast spew racial slurs towards each other. And then magically they reconsider their extreme opinions and the world’s a better place or something. It’s all stereotyping and superficial. Only the victimized characters have a shred of likeability.
I complain all the times about Oscar bait-y films winning things, but usually they’re at least well done. This one is just hitting all the easy points. I really can’t believe it won what all it did.”