Crash was a good movie
(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)
There have been some staggeringly misguided films to win Academy Awards over the history of the Oscars. Some recent (my understanding is that Green Book was horrific), some older (somebody’s gonna have to explain Dances with Wolves winning to me), but the history of the academy’s highest honor is hardly unblemished.
The thing, though, is that Crash does not belong on the list of undeserving winners.
A cursory search of “Oscars mistakes” on the ol’ Google machine will bring up a whole host of Crash results, calling it the worst Best Picture ever and a travesty of a champion. But just as fun a piece of research is to fire up the Movie Review Query Engine and check the movie there. Crash gets plenty of negative reviews, right alongside plenty of positive ones. And what you’ll notice with a deeper dive is: The positive reviews predominantly came right after the movie’s release, while the negative ones skew heavily toward ones that came out after the movie won its awards. (To be fair, either the site or its component links aren’t well maintained anymore, and so a lot of links to Crash reviews take you elsewhere. Take my word for it, because I’ve checked.)
People (not my friend Kevin, he will want me to stress, because we’ve had this conversation) liked Crash when it came out. It was well received and popular. Only when it won the highest honor did people start to go into backlash mode.
Now, Crash is far from perfect. In the annals of Best Picture winners, it’s definitely in or close to the bottom quartile. Part of its success is bred of being the best of a bad class that year — of the other Best Picture finalists, Good Night and Good Luck was fine, Munich was mediocre at best, and Brokeback Mountain was actively bad (yes it was, don’t argue with me). That leaves Capote, which I’ll admit to not having seen, but the last time you heard anyone mention that movie was when Phillip Seymour Hoffman died. It definitely didn’t stick in the public consciousness.
On the other hand, Crash pretty seamlessly wove stories together in interesting ways. It is carried by some great performances from Larenz Tate, Ludacris, and Ryan Phillippe (though I would definitely say Matt Dillon’s award-winning performance was not anywhere near the movie’s best). Sandra Bullock’s arc of realizing the housekeeper she had been cruel toward was actually her best friend was heartbreaking even as the character wasn’t someone you rooted for. Loretta Devine’s performance lasted about a minute, all told, and most of that was on the phone, and she still crushed it. It had some great small performances that all added up to a great snapshot-of-a-story sort of movie.
Crash was not up to the historic Best Picture standards. Sure, fine. But since we can’t go back after the fact and have it against Pulp Fiction or There Will Be Blood, we’re stuck comparing it to its actual competition, and by that standard, Crash is more than fine. The common complaint about the movie is that it is a series of vignettes that are obsessed with race. To which I say … yeah, so? Are you mad when the guys in Sideways are always drinking wine, or how there was just so much singing in Bohemian Rhapsody? Complaining that a movie spends to much time talking about the actual topic of the movie is a nonsensical complaint.
In retrospect, the mid-2000s was a rough time for movies. Slumdog Millionaire won a Best Picture, and the best you can say about it was that it was pretty and had a fun song at the end. You certainly can’t say it was a good movie. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won as something of a lifetime achievement award for that series. It was technically beautiful, but waaaaay too long and had like five different endings. The Departed won, and … look, this is a piece for another time, but The Departed was not a good movie, guys. It just wasn’t.
The fact that Crash won the Best Picture for 2005 might be an indictment of the Hollywood machine from that era. What it is not is an indictment of Crash itself. It was a fine (bordering on genuinely good) movie that benefited from an awful slate of competition. The Patriots have done that for two decades now and nobody says they are actually bad.
In conclusion, Crash was good. Hush up you.