Essay: Why did Crash win?
I know it's yesterday's news but maybe we can step back and look at this objectively. When they gave Ang Lee the Oscar for Best Director, everyone said, 'Well, that seals the deal. Brokeback is a lock.'
How was everyone so wrong? There are the benign theories -- the Academy voted for the hometown, urban picture over the rural, Red State one. Crash is an actor-centric movie. Brokeback fatigue.
The less benign ones -- Lion's Gate flooded the world with Crash screeners; the Academy is homophobic and didn't even watch Brokeback Mountain -- are no less valid.
We can objectively say that Brokeback captured the popular imagination more than Crash did. Parodies abounded. The word 'brokeback' became immediate slang on the lips of every radio d.j. It was a cultural touchstone. But that doesn't automatically make it Best Picture. In 2000, Fight Club wasn't even nominated.
Looking through my server logs, there are lots of people coming to this website looking for 'an essay on the movie Crash.' I imagine they are students, assigned to write about the movie by their teachers. Some teachers undoubtedly are and will be assigning Brokeback as well. But in lesser numbers. Because Crash won't threaten anyone's tenure. To borrow the song title from Avenue Q: everyone's a little bit rascist. We can bond over that. Racism is, after these many years, an acknowledged evil. Homophobia isn't. It just isn't. There are still states passing laws to "defend" marriage from gay people. Choosing Brokeback would've meant acknowledging the gay subtext in all those old movies about men alone together in the wilderness. It would've been a statement. It would've been political.
In the end, let's believe in this benign explanation. Let's believe that the worst thing one can be in our society is not racist or gay or homophobic, it is political. God forbid the rickety bones of this creaking democracy be lifted from the beanbag chair of complacency.
RELATED: Crash review; Brokeback review
Crash Winners: Show Me the Money
UPDATE 3/9/06: MCN's David Poland on the subject.
UPDATE 3/13/06: Upset Brokeback Fans Place Ad in Variety
posted by J. Ott @ 3/07/2006 08:18:00 AM
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Here's a segment from A.O. Scott's, "On Acting"
David opened the floor to suggestions of the year's worst movies, and
Crash is certainly a good starting point for me. Admittedly, Paul
Haggis' directorial debut wasn't one of those so-bad-it's-mesmerizing
debacles, like Town & Country or The Bonfire of the Vanities, that
Tony so lovingly remembered a few weeks back in the Times—if it had
been, it wouldn't have made my blood boil nearly as much. No, Crash is
an Important Film About the Times in Which We Live, which is another
way of saying that it's one of those self-congratulatory liberal
jerk-off movies that rolls around every once in a while to remind us
of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices,
and how, when the going gets tough, even the white supremacist cop who
gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is
capable of rising to the occasion. How touching. Haggis is trafficking
in much the same territory here as Michael Haneke is in Caché, only he
lacks the guts to pull out his paring knife and fillet his bourgeois
characters with the mercilessness they deserve. (Instead, when Sandra
Bullock's pampered Brentwood housewife accuses a Mexican-American
locksmith of copying her keys for illicit purposes, Haggis doesn't
condemn her reprehensible behavior so much as he sympathizes with it.)
People who say that Crash is an insightful portrait of life in Los
Angeles clearly don't live in the same town I do. Watching it, I
wondered if Haggis hadn't sat down with a copy of Thom Andersen's
brilliant essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself and deliberately written
a script that reinforces every bogus assumption about life in the
city—from the thesis that the only way people in L.A. connect with one
another is by getting into car crashes to the depiction of the untold
dangers of driving south of the 10 Freeway—that Andersen so skillfully
shoots down. And in a year that brought many (and in some cases
justified) accusations of racial insensitivity against movies from
King Kong to Memoirs of a Geisha, it was Crash that gave us Larenz
Tate and Ludacris as carjackers who view their actions as a form of
civilized protest, and Terrence Howard as creepy embodiment of
emasculated African-American yuppiedom. Not since Spanglish—which,
alas, wasn't that long ago—has a movie been so chock-a-block with
risible minority caricatures or done such a handy job of sanctioning
the very stereotypes it ostensibly debunks. Welcome to the best movie
of the year for people who like to say, "A lot of my best friends are
black."
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