This article contains spoilers for Crash (2004)Brendan Fraser won Best Actor at the 95th Academy Awards for… Whale. After such a long road, with many notable flings, the actor is officially back. His success story, who mummy To stupid comedy, to devastating divorce, to Oscars, this is exactly the kind of tale Hollywood loves to devour. But it isn’t the first time Frasier has had a film win awards given out by the Academy; Which goes first to the really great 1998 movie Gods and monsters. Whale It also isn’t the first arguably terrible movie but somehow Frasier gives a great performance in it. We’re referring, of course, to the pre-Brenaissance movie from 2004, Crashes.
Rating the film four stars (just as Roger Ebert and some other critics inexplicably did), Empire wrote at the time:
It is a feature of a great script that first impressions continually impact. When the contamination of the symbol threatens to creep in, it is always dissipated by a deeper insight or perversion into tragedy, sometimes farce, which lays naive preconceptions mercilessly bare.
Today, this film is considered the worst film ever to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. What happened?
Crash Team Racing
Crashes It opens and closes its story with a car accident. Both cases show the people involved in the incident getting out of their cars and spouting racial slurs at their opposites. It’s an unflattering ending, one that the 2004 film wants you to keep in mind as you enter and subsequently leave the cinema.
Not to be confused with Cronenberg’s 1996 film (The Best and Weirdest) of the same name, Crashes It focuses on Los Angeles residents who are seemingly separate but intrinsically connected. This was a popular trend at the time called “hyperlinking”, which was popularized by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s early films. Amores perros, 21gAnd Babylon. with CrashesCast from an all-star cast (including Sandra Bullock, both from War Machines’ Terence Howard and Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, and Michael Peña), the film sets out to tell the story of a day in the life in Los Angeles, presented via a delightful ‘drama week.’
After the enduring success of Pulp FictionAnd Crashes It arises with a non-linear storyline that shifts focus between the cast members – cops, petty car thieves, locksmiths, and husbands and wives. To be fair, Fraser only features Crashes Briefly. Starring as a district attorney, his movie time is perhaps the shortest among the big stars, as he was initially named seventh, with a host of stars not named after him.
crash and burn
too many characters; This is one of CrashesMany issues. You’ll feel like there’s a much better movie out there than this one that still introduces new characters, 35 minutes into its story. It’s hard to tell you briefly what Crashes revolves around, as it intentionally keeps its stories from showing in order to tie them in later. Some of these vignettes work (Don Cheadle finding his missing brother getting around quite well), most of them don’t (eg Ludacris finding a truck full of human slaves, or including Sandra Bullock’s character entirely).
Among the many characters, they all come packaged with a racial tag. There’s no subtle difference in any of it, as every creed and race seems to be involved in this story, instead creating a world of stereotype: a Mexican is a supposed gang member. Black youths carry guns and stop cars. The only man from Eastern Europe is a con engineer. The Chinese lady is a bad driver. The white man is a bent cop. It’s all surface level, and while trying to bring these stereotypes and assumptions of race into play, and then undermine them, Crashes He becomes confused by his own vision. It’s a movie that’s so stereotyped that it makes the whole experience feel clichéd.
Published in 2020 (maybe 20/20 hindsight), The Independent wrote an article about the film with its title simply stating “Trit, racist and boring:”
Otherwise, subtlety and thoughtfulness are not the film’s forte. In the Crashes Universe, you can’t even get your morning coffee without ending up in a steamy confrontation with a complete stranger; Every conversation somehow becomes a screaming match about race. The movie is a tennis match between broad and bigoted stereotypes
ACAB
Seen early on, a seasoned vet and racist copper (Matt Dillon) pulls a black couple into their car. He gropes and lashes out at them and attacks Thandwee Newton’s character, Christine, while her husband (Terrence Howard) can’t help but watch for fear of worse punishment from the police. Leave with a warning, and the couple go home and argue about how and what they could have done instead. Later in the movie, still affected by what happened, Kristen is in a car wreck as her downed car pours gasoline.
Trapped in the car, it’s the same police officer from the accident who happens to be on the scene to help now. In an act of bravery, he removed the woman from her car seat and pulled her from the car before it caught fire. While it’s probably the best scene in the entire movie (although it really moves along with Mark Isham’s score), setting up this character as so unsavory and then painting him as a (white) savior creates a morally questionable dynamic, one that feeds into its audience. Forcibly on the stomach for the rest of the runtime.
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after several years, Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri would attempt something similar to Sam Rockwell’s racist cop character, to greater (but still controversial) success. Not entirely sentimental and superficial, Martin McDonagh’s film did not excuse anyone of anything. Crasheson the other hand, uses cheap cinematic devices to suggest that we are all connected, making revolting the racial, cultural, and moral nuances of each character to gently say that “we are all human.” We are the world.
The script kicks off to say, “No! These characters aren’t (ahem) black and white,” but they don’t seem to really benefit from the ambiguity either. The picture’s moral compass is deliberately blurry, while it intentionally spreads itself as closely as possible with this palette of townspeople, as if to avoid actually addressing anything. But while it boasts many characters’ stories, you can’t help but feel that a more linear, A-to-B narrative would have really benefited the film and been stronger overall, especially by focusing on one person’s perspective, and having everyone interact with them.
Does time heal all wounds? no.
Naturally, the time was not kind Crashes. The film won Academy Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Motion Picture in 2006, and it continues to be hailed as the biggest misstep in Academy Awards history (although it’s another thinly veiled, morally simplistic film about race, green bookvery close). adding fire to the flames, Crashes will hit Brokeback Mountain Best Picture Winner. Presumably because of its age-old homophobia, this quasi-racist movie about race would be the best LGBTQ+ groundbreaking film to some extent.
In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter polled hundreds of Academy voters to recast their ballots to reflect which film they believed was the true Best Picture winner over the years, with Brokeback Mountain Exit on top Crashes. It’s telling that in the aforementioned article, which details the accounts of the famous winners all the way back to 1977, The Hollywood Reporter would choose to use a photo from Crashes for a picture of their head.
Fallout (proper title) Crashes Just keep going over time. On top of ACAB’s current global sentiment, behind-the-scenes issues arose for the film as well. Published in 2011, a judge considered it CrashesProducer and financier Bob Yare had withheld funds from its director and cast. Co-writer and director Paul Haggis is an alleged rapist and sex offender who, in 2022, is held liable in a civil trial over the rape of a publicist and forced to pay $10 million. These are the people behind Tell Us to be more tolerant and “colorblind,” and they’re the people who arguably expose the inauthentic, cynical fraud of this movie more than anything else.
chasty It’s still an ugly movie on the inside. It looks beautiful on the face of it and has been given in kind by the people at the top, so that they can pat themselves on the back and call themselves inclusive, liberal, and wise. Ironically, tender Crashes Better picture instead Brokeback Mountain is the most revealing aspect of all of this. vote for Crashes I mean, Hollywood elites can have their cake and eat it without having to think LGBTQ+, at least until 2016 (and even then, they almost stole it from her). moon light in favor of the straight ivory dance of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling).
Think again CrashesAfter winning an Oscar, it was time for the Academy to share their insurance information.
