The uproar over Crash's best picture win at the Oscars is so ridiculous that it begs for comment. I happened to watch Crash on Sunday afternoon in anticipation of the evening's festivities, and will repeat what I essentially said to my wife at dinner that evening. It is a good film with complex storytelling and realistic multi-faceted characters that builds to a strong climax. What keeps it from being a great film is a bit of heavy-handedness and an ending that goes on longer than Return of the King's. The performances are mostly excellent, in particular Terrence Howard but also Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, William Fitchner and - who guessed it? - Ludacris. The weak links for me were Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock, but even she has a scene that redeems her performance just a little by the end. While by no means perfect, it certainly is deserving of notice, and would be my pick over the only other nominated films that I saw (Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good Luck).
So why the cries of disdain? The master of one apparently well-known awards database web site (awards.fennec.org) has vowed to shut down over what he/she calls "the worst Best Picture in history". (As an aside, I had never heard of this site before reading this proclamation in a newspaper article. It's a great site, and would be sorely missed if this vow is kept.) This is way too dramatic. After all, is it worse than Gladiator? How about Titanic? Or, dear God, Forrest Gump? Each of these (well, the first two, anyway) have much to recommend them, but were they the best film of their year? Were they even in the ten best? Gladiator was a mildly-received box office smash that somehow emerged as a candidate when the noms were announced and slipped into the winner's circle over the much more deserving Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Titanic won on the power of its technical achievement and box office majesty, but can anyone honestly admit being able to look at it in its entirety today? As for Forrest Gump, it's just one of those embarassments that the Academy sometimes succumbs to, never to be spoken of again in polite company.
Hell, let's take this further and mention some of the less-than-worthy films that have been nominated for best picture, like Jerry Maguire and Scent of a Woman. How about 1990, when Ghost and Awakenings managed to be nominated over such clearly superior fare as Reversal of Fortune, The Grifters, Avalon and Edward Scissorhands. And while we're discussing injustices, Martin Scorsese isn't the only director without an Oscar in that category. How about Hitchcock, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Ray, Renoir, etc., etc., etc. The Oscars have nothing to do with art. They are a beauty pageant, a pat on the back, a celebration. To the extent that they are about art, it is the opinions of a small group of people who live mostly in California that matter. In the collective opinion of this group, potentially limited to 20% of the membership plus one, Crash was a better movie than Brokeback Mountain. Are they wrong? You think so? Then start your own bloody awards.
I hadn't realized how much negative opinion there was about Crash until Tuesday past when I picked up the latest Premiere and noted how many really bad reviews it had received over the past year. This was a surprise, since my recollection was that it had a pretty good score on Metacritic (www.metacritic.com). A check back there shows a score of 69, which is generally favourable, although I recall it being more in the high 70s earlier in the year. I suspect the score came down when some critics who ignored it on initial release looked at it later in the year when it picked up momentum in the awards race and these folks did some Monday-morning quarterbacking by concluding that their predecessors were wrong. David Denby and Roger Ebert are two of the critics who raved about Crash, and those high-profile opinions may have helped develop the Hollywood consensus that led to Sunday's upset win. It's a film that spoke to the voting audience in a highly personal way, hitting them in the gut, and the seal of critical approval helped them shape an opinion that they might have been a little anxious about expressing. It's a good movie, and doesn't deserve all this negativity.
Now, weighing in with a classic crybaby attitude is David Cronenberg, which really disappointed me. For me, the best film of 2005 was Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which received scant attention from the Academy. Today, little David is in the paper, whining about being neglected, not just by Oscar but by his brothers in the Director's Guild. But the worst part is his comment that the use of Crash as the title of this movie was unethical because Cronenberg released a film by this name in 1996. In fact, Cronenberg claims to have said as much to Crash writer/director Paul Haggis. God, what incredible garbage this is. We aren't talking about Citizen Kane or Gone with the Wind here. Your film wasn't that good, Dave (although the sex scenes - and there were tons of them - were awesome, almost pornographic, only with famous faces), and your title isn't that distinctive. Take a look at IMDb and get back to me, Mr. Cronenberg. There have been at least nine other movies that have used Crash as a main or alternate title, including a feature from 1977. Sure, you used the title of the book you were adapting. But you don't own it. You would have a right to be pissed if Haggis had called his movie Videodrome or Scanners. But a nice generic word like "crash". David, you need to get a life.
The Oscars are fun (sometimes), and can be a pleasure if the films or artists you like win. But they reflect only the opinions of a few thousand people out of the six or so billion on the planet. They are neither right nor are they wrong. They simply are. To let that affect how much you enjoy movies is to cheat yourself, and not the Academy. The people who lost on Sunday will work again, making such great films as The Hulk, 1941, The Order and Death to Smoochy. And we will be richer for it, and ready to root for them on Oscar night 2007. As long as they don't include James Schamus and his ridiculous bowtie. That I can't abide.
So why the cries of disdain? The master of one apparently well-known awards database web site (awards.fennec.org) has vowed to shut down over what he/she calls "the worst Best Picture in history". (As an aside, I had never heard of this site before reading this proclamation in a newspaper article. It's a great site, and would be sorely missed if this vow is kept.) This is way too dramatic. After all, is it worse than Gladiator? How about Titanic? Or, dear God, Forrest Gump? Each of these (well, the first two, anyway) have much to recommend them, but were they the best film of their year? Were they even in the ten best? Gladiator was a mildly-received box office smash that somehow emerged as a candidate when the noms were announced and slipped into the winner's circle over the much more deserving Traffic and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Titanic won on the power of its technical achievement and box office majesty, but can anyone honestly admit being able to look at it in its entirety today? As for Forrest Gump, it's just one of those embarassments that the Academy sometimes succumbs to, never to be spoken of again in polite company.
Hell, let's take this further and mention some of the less-than-worthy films that have been nominated for best picture, like Jerry Maguire and Scent of a Woman. How about 1990, when Ghost and Awakenings managed to be nominated over such clearly superior fare as Reversal of Fortune, The Grifters, Avalon and Edward Scissorhands. And while we're discussing injustices, Martin Scorsese isn't the only director without an Oscar in that category. How about Hitchcock, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Ray, Renoir, etc., etc., etc. The Oscars have nothing to do with art. They are a beauty pageant, a pat on the back, a celebration. To the extent that they are about art, it is the opinions of a small group of people who live mostly in California that matter. In the collective opinion of this group, potentially limited to 20% of the membership plus one, Crash was a better movie than Brokeback Mountain. Are they wrong? You think so? Then start your own bloody awards.
I hadn't realized how much negative opinion there was about Crash until Tuesday past when I picked up the latest Premiere and noted how many really bad reviews it had received over the past year. This was a surprise, since my recollection was that it had a pretty good score on Metacritic (www.metacritic.com). A check back there shows a score of 69, which is generally favourable, although I recall it being more in the high 70s earlier in the year. I suspect the score came down when some critics who ignored it on initial release looked at it later in the year when it picked up momentum in the awards race and these folks did some Monday-morning quarterbacking by concluding that their predecessors were wrong. David Denby and Roger Ebert are two of the critics who raved about Crash, and those high-profile opinions may have helped develop the Hollywood consensus that led to Sunday's upset win. It's a film that spoke to the voting audience in a highly personal way, hitting them in the gut, and the seal of critical approval helped them shape an opinion that they might have been a little anxious about expressing. It's a good movie, and doesn't deserve all this negativity.
Now, weighing in with a classic crybaby attitude is David Cronenberg, which really disappointed me. For me, the best film of 2005 was Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which received scant attention from the Academy. Today, little David is in the paper, whining about being neglected, not just by Oscar but by his brothers in the Director's Guild. But the worst part is his comment that the use of Crash as the title of this movie was unethical because Cronenberg released a film by this name in 1996. In fact, Cronenberg claims to have said as much to Crash writer/director Paul Haggis. God, what incredible garbage this is. We aren't talking about Citizen Kane or Gone with the Wind here. Your film wasn't that good, Dave (although the sex scenes - and there were tons of them - were awesome, almost pornographic, only with famous faces), and your title isn't that distinctive. Take a look at IMDb and get back to me, Mr. Cronenberg. There have been at least nine other movies that have used Crash as a main or alternate title, including a feature from 1977. Sure, you used the title of the book you were adapting. But you don't own it. You would have a right to be pissed if Haggis had called his movie Videodrome or Scanners. But a nice generic word like "crash". David, you need to get a life.
The Oscars are fun (sometimes), and can be a pleasure if the films or artists you like win. But they reflect only the opinions of a few thousand people out of the six or so billion on the planet. They are neither right nor are they wrong. They simply are. To let that affect how much you enjoy movies is to cheat yourself, and not the Academy. The people who lost on Sunday will work again, making such great films as The Hulk, 1941, The Order and Death to Smoochy. And we will be richer for it, and ready to root for them on Oscar night 2007. As long as they don't include James Schamus and his ridiculous bowtie. That I can't abide.
posted by George @ 12:43 p.m.
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