Capote, terrific film. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, great film. It was up against Spielberg (Munich), Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck), a biopic (Capote), and the year’s most controversial film (Brokeback Mountain). (Actually, if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, each of the four non-winners earned better critical ratings.). That explains it! But for all of Crash’s many missteps, we can’t forget that this is the same film that forced many to take Ludacris’s acting career seriously – and for that, the Fast & Furious franchise will be forever grateful.
Advertisement
Writer-director Paul Haggis says he didn’t deserve an Oscar for his movie Crash. “There were great films that year”, Haggis admitted. “I should have corrected that.’ No. So when you’re doing something that’s different, I think people are always going to say things, but it amused me more than anything”. (“I’m very glad to have those”, he told HitFix.) And he’s still proud of his work.
His statements don’t mean that he is about to mail his trophy haul over to the visionaries behind Brokeback Mountain. Now however, for some reason that’s the film that touched people the most that year. “I mean I knew it was the social experiment that I wanted, so I think it’s a really good social experiment”, he said. “And you can’t judge these films like that”.
No word on which of his fellow nominees he would have voted for. “They’re lovely things. But you shouldn’t ask me what the best film of the year was because I wouldn’t be voting for Crash“. And good for Paul Haggis, who seems like a decent dude, and who’s made some good movies that probably got less praise than they deserved as a result of some kind of weird attempt in certain corners of the media to balance out all the over-praise for Crash (like In the Valley of Elah, his underrated movie about Iraq War veterans).
In any case, Haggis is tackling racial issues again with his new HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, starring Oscar Isaac as a mayor whose career is destroyed by a federal mandate to incorporate low-income housing in his city’s wealthier (and whiter) neighborhoods.
Advertisement
I don’t doubt Crash may have affected people, but stacked against the competition it’s hard to argue much for it. It tried to paint a hard-hitting portrait of modern racial tensions, but it just came off like a poorly-written high school kid’s thesis on why racism is like, totally bad and stuff.
