This article contains spoilers for Crash (2004)Brendan Fraser won Best Actor at the 95th Academy Awards for The whale. After such a long road, with so many notable ups and downs, the actor is officially back. His success story, from The mummy to silly comedies, to a devastating divorce, to the Oscars, is just the kind of story Hollywood loves to devour. But it’s not the first time Fraser has had a film take home Academy awards; that goes first to the really great 1998 movie Gods and monsters. The whale is also not the first arguably horrific but somehow the Oscar-winning film Fraser did a great job. We’re talking, of course, about the 2004 pre-Brenaissance movie, Crash.
Rate the movie four stars (just as Roger Ebert and some other critics inexplicably did), rich wrote at the time:
It is a hallmark of the brilliant screenplay that first impressions are constantly thrown aside. When the taint of tokenism threatens to creep in, it is invariably dispelled by a deeper understanding or a turn to tragedy, sometimes even farce, that mercilessly exposes naive prejudices
Today, this movie is considered the worst movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture. What happened?
Crash Team Racing
Crash opens and closes his story with a car accident. In both cases, the people involved in the accident get out of their cars and utter racist remarks about their opposites. It’s an obnoxious bookend, one that the 2004 movie wants you to keep in mind as you enter and then exit the movie theater.
Not to be confused with the (better, weirder) 1996 Cronenberg movie of the same name, Crash focuses on seemingly separate but also intrinsically connected residents of Los Angeles. This was a popular trend at the time called “hyperlink” film, which was popularized by the early films of Alejandro González Iñárritu. Amores perros, 21 gramsAnd Babylon. Of Crash‘s overrun star cast (including Sandra Bullock, both War Machines in Terence Howard and Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon and Michael Peña), the film aims to capture a day in the life of LA, presented via the gaudy ‘Drama of the Week. ‘
After the eternal success of Pulp Fiction, Crash begins with a non-linear storyline where the focus is switched between the cast members – cops, petty car thieves, a locksmith and husbands. To be fair, Fraser appears alone Crash short. Starring as the District Attorney, his screen time is arguably the shortest of the big stars, with his name billed seventh at the start, with a host of stars yet to be named after him.
Crash and burn
Too many characters; that’s one of them Crash‘s many problems. You’d feel like there’s a much better movie in there than this one that still introduces new characters 35 minutes into the story. It is difficult to say briefly and concisely what Crash is about, because it deliberately keeps its stories broad in order to connect them later. Some of these vignettes work (Don Cheadle makes his missing brother look nice), most don’t (Ludacris finds a van full of human slaves, for example, or the whole shot of Sandra Bullock’s character).
Out of the many, many characters, they’re all packed with a racist tick. None of it is particularly nuanced, with seemingly every creed and race involved in this story, and instead it creates a universe of stereotypes: the Mexican is a supposed gang member. The young black boys have guns and rob cars. That one Eastern European man is a crooked engineer. The Chinese lady is a bad driver. The white man is a crooked cop. It’s all superficial, and as we try to show these stereotypes and assumptions of races at play and then subvert them, Crash gets confused by his own vision. It’s a movie that’s fluent in stereotypes, making the whole experience seem clichéd.
Published in 2020 (maybe with 20/20 afterwards), The independent wrote an article about the movie titled simply “trepid, racist and boring:”
Otherwise, subtlety and thoughtfulness are not the film’s strong points. In the Crash universe, you can’t even grab a cup of coffee in the morning without ending up in a blemish-riddled confrontation with a complete stranger; every conversation somehow becomes a screaming contest about race. The film is a tennis match of broad, bigoted stereotypes
ACAB
Seen early on, a seasoned vet and racist cop (Matt Dillon) puts a black couple in their car. While frisking them, he gropes and assaults Thandiwe Newton’s character, Christine, while her husband (Terence Howard) can’t help but watch for fear of a harsher punishment from the police. Stop with a warning, the couple drive home and argue about how and what could have happened instead. Later in the film, still affected by what happened, Christine is in a car accident with gasoline pouring onto her overturned vehicle.
Caught in the car, the same police officer from the incident is the one who is now on the scene to help. In an act of bravery, he removes the woman from her car seat and pulls her out of the vehicle before it catches fire. While it’s probably the best scene in the whole movie (albeit it really moves alongside Mark Isham’s score), depicting this character as so repulsive and then portraying him as a (white) savior creates a morally questionable dynamic, which makes it public for a long time. them to stomach for the remainder of the runtime.
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A few years later, Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri would try something similar with Sam Rockwell’s racist police character, to much greater (but still controversial) success. Martin McDonagh’s film was unemotionally manipulative and completely superficial, and it didn’t absolve anyone of anything. Crashon the other hand, uses cheap cinematic tools to suggest that we are all connected, nauseatingly flattening each character’s racial, cultural, and moral differences to bluntly say “we are all human,” as a cheap repetition by We are the world.
The screenplay is like, “No! These characters aren’t (ahem) black and white,” but doesn’t really seem to benefit from the ambiguity, either. The photo’s moral compass is deliberately murky as it purposefully spreads as far as possible with this canvas of city dwellers, as if trying to avoid actually addressing anything. But while there are so many character stories, you can’t help feeling that a more linear story from A to B would have benefited the movie and been stronger overall, especially by focusing on the perspective of one person and everyone else to respond. to them.
Does time heal all wounds? No.
Time, of course, has not been kind Crash. It won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and Best Picture in 2006 and continues to be hailed as perhaps the biggest mistake in Academy Awards history (albeit another bland, morally simplistic film about race, The Green Book, comes awfully close). Add fire to the flames, Crash would turn off Brokeback Mountain as the winner of the best photo. Presumably due to old-fashioned homophobia, this quasi-racist film about race would be better than the somewhat groundbreaking LGBTQ+ film.
2015, The Hollywood Reporter polled hundreds of Academy voters to rearrange their ballots to reflect which film they considered the true Best Picture winners over the years, with Brokeback Mountain get on top of it Crash. Significantly, in that article, which detailed descriptions of notorious winners all the way back to 1977, The Hollywood Reporter would choose to use an image from Crash for their header image.
The Consequences of (the Appropriate Title) Crash has only continued as time went on. On top of it now worldwide feelings of ACAB, problems also arose behind the scenes for the film. Published in 2011, a judge ruled that Crash‘s producer and financier Bob Yari had been withholding money from the director and cast. Co-writer and director Paul Haggis is an alleged rapist and sexual abuser, and was found liable in a 2022 civil trial for the rape of a publicist and was forced to pay $10 million. These are the people behind a movie who told us to be more tolerant and “colorblind,” and they’re the people who arguably expose this movie’s inauthentic, cynical deceit more than anything else.
Crash remains an ugly film on the inside. It looks beautiful at first glance and was awarded in kind by the people at the top so that they could pat themselves on the back and call themselves inclusive, liberal and wise. Ironically, give Crash Best photo instead of Brokeback Mountain is the most revealing aspect of it all. Vote for Crash meant the Hollywood elites could have their cake and eat it without having to think about LGBTQ+ people, at least until 2016 (and even then they almost stole it from Moonlight in favor of the straight ivory dancing of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling).
Thinking back to CrashOscar win, it’s about time the Academy exchanged their insurance records.