In my previous post, I wrote about how much I hated The Deer Hunter. I said it was poorly directed, poorly acted (at times), incredibly racist and too long. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture, which has always been an interesting award. Out of all the film award ceremonies, the Oscars are the ones that everybody cares about the most. Hell, there are people that only care about the Oscars when it comes to film award ceremonies.
There are quite a few films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture that many people say didn't deserve to win. The Best Picture winners that get the most criticism are Shakespeare In Love and Crash. I haven't seen Shakespeare In Love, so I can't comment on it. I have, however, seen Crash, and I thought it was a great movie. Crash is a film that gets so much criticism for its Oscar win, that even Paul Haggis said it didn't deserve to win Best Picture. He wrote and directed it, but even he thought the competing films were superior to his.
I don't care about whether or not it deserved to win. Just because the Oscars are so highly regarded, doesn't mean they're always right. Gary Oldman, one of the greatest, most diverse actors of all time, has only one Oscar nomination. Jonah Hill, a funny actor, has two Oscar nominations. I like Jonah Hill, but he shouldn't have more nominations than Gary Oldman. I don't blame him though: He has more nominations because starred in films that campaigned for Oscars, while Gary Oldman doesn't really star in those kind of movies.
This post isn't about whether or not Crash deserved to win. I haven't seen all the movies nominated that year, so I can't even comment. Even if I did, it's irrelevant because I'm not trying to say it deserved to win. What I am trying to say is that it gets way more criticism than it deserves. I know it's a very unpopular opinion to like Crash, and you don't have to like it. I just want you to appreciate its redeeming qualities.
Maybe Crash is actually a beloved film, but the haters are more vocal in their opinions than the fans are. That must be the case, because the IMDb ratings contradict the wide opinion that it was inferior to the other films nominated that year. As of the publishing of this blog post, here are the IMDb ratings for all the films that got nominated for Best Picture that year:
Crash is rated 7.9/10 from 346,626 users
Brokeback Mountain is rated 7.7/10 from 246,102 users
Munich is rated 7.6/10 from 169,159 users
Capote is rated 7.4/10 from 93,960 users
Good Night, and Good Luck. is rated 7.5/10 from 81,704 users
Going by the logic of these ratings, people thought Crash was the best film out of the nominees. Not only is the rating higher, but it has way more votes than the other films. People said Brokeback Mountain deserved to win that year, yet it has 100,000 votes less than Crash, and the rating is slightly lower. This isn't because Crash was more successful either. Brokeback Mountain made more money in the box office than Crash did, so it would make sense if it had a higher IMDb rating than Crash, along with way more votes.
"Yeah, but Crash is the lowest rated on Rotten Tomatoes out of all those movies--"
That's irrelevant. The Rotten Tomatoes rating lists the ratings of the critics. If you compare the audience scores to each of these movies, Crash has the highest Rotten Tomatoes rating for audiences. Most of the people that hate Crash are audiences. This video of Crash winning Best Picture has way more dislikes than likes. You really think those are film critics disliking and commenting on the movie?
If you're one of the haters, you're probably wondering why I think Crash is a great movie. So I'll explain.
I love movies that break conventions (for valid reasons). Conventions exist for a good reason: Because they usually work from a storytelling standpoint. For example, having an antagonist that wants to take over a building, a city, a country or the entire world usually works because greed and power are commonly associated with villains, and a lot of real villains are greedy, power-hungry scumbags. When there's a storytelling device that usually works, it becomes overused, and then it comes conventional and cliche.
Breaking convention means you're taking risks. If you take a risk in your film which pays off successfully, then it will make your film stand out among all the conventional stories. If Pulp Fiction and Fight Club followed conventions, would those films have the same impact? Of course not.
One of the biggest storytelling risks you can take is not having a central protagonist. American Beauty was about several characters, but Lester Burnham was the central protagonist. A film that has so many characters, none of which being the central character could have made Crash completely unfocused. All the characters are dealing with their own problems, and going off in different locations. For any film to work, it requires some kind of focus.
So how does Crash do that? How does every small storyline in Crash connect, to feel like it belongs in the movie? If a movie isn't driven by a central character, and it doesn't have a specific plot for all the characters to follow, then how can the movie be cohesive and focused?
You use theme. Crash isn't driven by its characters or its plot, but rather the themes that it tries to convey. The themes in Crash include racism, hypocrisy, and redemption. The problem with making a theme-driven film is that it means you have to make every storyline and almost every scene serve your theme. Theme-driven films can come across as pretentious and preachy. Magnolia is another film that's driven by themes, and there are quite a few people that despise it. Kevin Smith in particular. It's still my favorite movie, but I can understand why people didn't like it. I can also understand why people didn't like Crash because of its themes.
Racism is a serious issue. Movies that have serious issues as their theme will inevitably come across as pretentious or preachy at times. These movies come across as manipulative, which can alienate audiences.
Crash is a manipulative movie. But guess what? So is every other movie. A movie has to manipulate its audience to keep them interested, otherwise the audience will just stop watching the movie. Look at the most beloved heroes in fiction. What do Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, and Harry Potter have in common? They're orphans. Orphans are inherently likable because they're sympathetic. We love our parents, who love us back. You feel sorry for people that grew up without their parents, which makes them likable. This was from a great Cracked article, which explains how movies manipulate us.
The characters in Crash are introduced as stereotypical, which was Paul Haggis' intention. Then the characters change over the course of the film, which subverts those stereotypes. For almost every storyline, you have a character who starts off as a stereotype who contradict themselves. Then as the film progresses, the characters change. Some change from their contradictions, others change from seeing the error of their ways. It's impressive how Paul Haggis manages to interweave these storylines together in a way that feels dramatically effective yet natural to the story (most of the time). There are moments that come across as far fetched because of how people meet each other, but this isn't a problem for the majority of the film.
NOTE: From here on, I will get into plot spoilers. If you haven't seen Crash yet, watch it with an open mind.
Crash is not a flawless movie. I know that. I do agree with some of the criticisms. The scene where the Persian shop owner shoots the Mexican girl with a blank-firing gun was overly preachy in the way it was directed and acted. There are a few other scenes that also tried too hard to bring the message across.
Crash isn't even that preachy most of the time though. In fact, it shows so many different aspects of racism, like the scene where Terrence Howard's character directs a TV episode. A producer walks up to him and says the actor should have said a line of dialogue with less formality because the actor was black. He didn't think the black character would say the line in such a formal way, which is a racist/stereotypical thought to have. This scene wasn't overly dramatic, but it showed a realistic situation. It shows that all of us are biased and believe in stereotypes, even if we're not intentionally trying to pigeonhole a type of person.
Crash is only 112 minutes long. Not even two hours long, yet it follows so many characters, has so many storylines, that take so many different directions. An amateur screenwriter doesn't have the skills to make a 112 minute long movie with all these characters and storylines. Crash won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and rightfully so. Paul Haggis made a great movie that broke conventions.
8/10
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