One thing that people like to see at the Oscars is an underdog story.  There are plenty of instances of a movie or a performer that unexpectedly defies the odds and pulls off an upset win.  Think Olivia Colman winning over the heavily favored Glenn Close in the 2019 awards ceremony, or Moonlight (2016) pulling off the upset of the century by beating La La Land (2016), with it’s record tying number of 14 nominations, in the Best Picture race.  The reason why people love these wins is because it’s sometimes offers a moment of spontaneous surprise in a show that can often be a tad too predictable, especially when you are following the momentums of the race closely.  But there are wins in past years that didn’t come as pleasant surprises, but instead left many people scratching their heads.  We tend to forget that the Oscars is more or less another race based on internal politics within the industry, and that sometimes the winner is not always the popular choice but rather the one who’s campaign strategy was the most well executed.  There are movies that are liked well enough for a nomination, but feel out of place if they actually win the award, especially if there are better movies in the same race.  And these movies tend to be cursed after winning the top award as they are looked at as being undeserving of the award they won due to the fact that the movies they beat have had longer staying power over the years; some even achieving all-time classic status.  Think How Green Was My Valley (1941) beating Citizen Kane (1941), or Ordinary People (1980) beating Raging Bull (1980).  But it’s also worth noting that the backlash against these movies may be bit too harsh, solely due to the fact that they fall short by comparison to their more famous competitors.  A movie may still be good even if it was undeserving of the Best Picture honor it snagged away from better movies.  It’s happened numerous times throughout Oscars’ long history, but perhaps the most severe backlash was leveled at the winner of the 2006 Academy Awards ceremony: 2005’s Crash.

Crash came out in the early summer of 2005 to mostly positive reviews.  It was the feature directorial debut of longtime TV writer Paul Haggis who only a year prior had been nominated for his screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (2004).  Crash was an ambitious exploration of race relations in the city of Los Angeles, told through interconnected vignettes of characters both black and white, rich and poor, criminal and law enforcement, etc.  It was also blessed with an all-star ensemble that included future Oscar-winners like Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser, as well as rising stars such as Don Cheadle, Terrence Howard, Thandiwe Newton, and Michael Pena.  The movie has thought provoking moments here and there, but as a collective whole it kind of misses the mark of the message it’s trying to impart on the audience.  Generally, people were pleased with the movie, but it came as a bit of a shocker that it managed to earn a Best Picture nomination.  That’s where people thought it’s meteoric rise would end.  The favored movie of that evening was destined to be the groundbreaking tragic queer romance movie Brokeback Mountain (2005), which had received the most nominations of the season and was racking up wins across the board before Oscar night came.  Crash did pick up a Screen Actors’ Guild win for it’s impressive ensemble, but Brokeback Mountain had won the Golden Globe, the PGA, DGA and WGA honors leading up to the ceremony; all major bell-weathers.  On the night of the Oscars, Brokeback was winning the bulk of the preamble awards that Best Picture winners usually take away, such as Original Score, Cinematography, and Adapted Screenplay.  Paul Haggis came away with an Original Screenplay win, which many saw as Crash’s consolation for the night.  With director Ang Lee’s expected Best Director win for Brokeback, the final award seemed all but certain.  And then Jack Nicholson who was presenting the Best Picture award that evening delivered a shockwave across the Dolby Theater and the entire Hollywood industry when he opened the envelope and announced Crash as the winner.  It was definitely a surprise win to everyone, and as we would see, it was also not a popular one either.

Brokeback Mountain’s nomination was seen as a profound statement of support for the LGBTQ+ community when it was up for Best Picture.  This deconstruction of the American Western that featured a romance between two closeted gay men came out in a time when the rights of queer people were under assault.  The Bush Administration that was in power at the time were pushing hard for a Constitutional Amendment that defined marriage as being between two people of opposite genders.  This would have enshrined into the founding document of this nation a discriminatory ban on same sex relationships.  Attitudes towards gay marriage would thankfully change in the following decade, but in the 2000’s, it was still a hotly contested issue, and the Queer community was facing intense opposition to their right to marry.  That’s why Brokeback Mountain was seen as such an important movie for it’s time, because it was a sympathetic portrayal of a queer relationship made and promoted by a major film studio (Universal, under their Focus Features banner) that openly condemned the persecution that the community had been facing (and sadly still does to this day).  Hollywood, despite some faults, has mostly been a place that champions marginalized groups and this was the time to shed a light on the LGBTQ community and give them the much needed mainstream exposure that they had been lacking for so long.  But sadly, despite winning quite a few awards, Brokeback Mountain came up short of the top award of the night.  How could this destined to be sure thing, a profound statement of support from Hollywood towards the Queer community, fall short to a movie like Crash which didn’t have a lot to say about prejudice that hadn’t already been said plenty of times before.

One reason why Crash came away with the upset is because of the social make-up of the Academy itself.  Hollywood is for the most part, and always has been, a progressively liberal majority industry.  It is also a very insulated community as well.  While social progressiveness is something that many in Hollywood value, they also absorb politics in a way that fits within their Cosmopolitan lifestyles as well.  That’s why members of the Academy responds to movies that appeal to their sense of personal experience, which in some ways may ignorant of causes and issues that fall outside of their inner circle.  In this case, it might have been what pushed Crash over the top at the Academy Awards.  Queer themes in mainstream movies were still a bit of a novelty in Hollywood, while at the same time, racial politics still hit close to home.  This was of course the city that saw the riots erupt after the beating of Rodney King, as well as the O.J. Simpson trial that also stirred up racial discussions across the country.  Paul Haggis’ contemplative feature about collisions of racial tensions within the City of Angels just rang more true to the Academy than Gay Cowboys.  It doesn’t mean that the bulk of the Academy didn’t support the rights of the LGBTQ community; though the true intentions behind most individual voting is unclear.  In many ways, Brokeback Mountain may have been the victim of it’s own historic status.  Queer cinema was still niche, and gay rights was only just starting to gain traction in America.  Academy voters may have felt that supporting such a movie for Best Picture was going to be too much of a statement against the establishment at the time, and they didn’t want that backlash to come down on them.

But by doing this, the Academy only created a different kind of backlash.  People rightly viewed Hollywood’s timidity towards supporting gay rights fully as an insult to the community, and over time as the right to marry thankfully became more of a mainstream position, this decision on the Academy’s part has appeared more and more out of touch.  But, is Crash deserving of all the scorn that it has received in the 19 years after it’s Best Picture win.  The complaint about the movie that feels most apt is that it is tone deaf about the subject it is covering.  It’s very clear that this is a story about racial tensions in America told from the perspective of a middle aged white guy.  Haggis has good intentions with his writing, but not a lot of nuance when it comes to tackling racism from multiple sides.  It probably would have helped if was writing scenes with a collaborator from one of the marginalized communities depicted in the film.  There are a lot of far fetched scenarios in the movie that undermine the message that it’s trying to deliver.  One involves Terrence Howard’s character taking the police on in a wild high speed chase with him ultimately trying to egg them on to use force against him, and yet he still walks away free and unharmed.  Another scene has two black men played by Ludacris and Larenz Tate discussing the hypocrisy of racial profiling right before they carjack someone.  Haggis’ screenplay are filled with these far fetched scenarios that get spiced up with platitudes about the sad state of racism in America, and in the end it just make the whole movie feel hollow and disingenuous.  Its like Haggis believes that he’s delivering something profound to the world, but the wild swings only make his attempts at it feel less impactful, and it just shows him to be an outsider looking in without any actual real world insight.

Are there positives about the movie.  Sure there are.  The performances by the cast in particular really help to elevate the film.  Of special note is Don Cheadle, who gives the movie it’s most subtle and assured performance, as the character that’s closest to being the central figure.  This film would come out immediately after his breakout Oscar-nominated role in Hotel Rwanda (2004), and it helped to cement him as one of the most reliably solid actors in the business, helping to lead him to a great franchise role in the MCU as the hero War Machine (ironically taking over the role from his Crash co-star Terrence Howard).  Thandiwe Newton also delivers a strong performance as  woman who deals with two different levels of discriminations in the movie, both as a woman and as a woman of color.  But the standout performance in the movie surprisingly belongs to Matt Dillon in a role that in other less capable hands could have become an insultingly tone deaf character to include in a movie about race.  In the film, Dillon plays a racist cop who also commits a sexual assault on one of the minority “suspects” he chooses to pull over (played by Newton).  But, later in the film, he saves the same woman from a car wreck in a harrowing rescue scene, showing that he has the capacity within him to be a hero at the right moment.  This is one of the more far fetched elements of the movie, and people point to this character as one of the major problems with Haggis’ tackling of racial tensions in the movie by trying to go out of his way to depict the racist cop with an eye towards sympathy.  And yet, Dillon’s performance nearly makes it work, because he manages to ground the character in a nuanced way.  He doesn’t go over the top with the character, especially with the racism, and it makes the character far more complex than he probably reads on the page.  Naturally, this nuanced performance helped Matt Dillon to be the sole nominated actor for this film, and it’s still one of the actor’s best.  Given the level of strong performances from a pretty stacked all-star cast, it’s no surprise the film was awarded the Ensemble prize at the SAG awards.  And given that the largest voting block of the Academy is the Actors’ Branch, this likely was another key towards the film’s upset victory.

The years haven’t been kind to the movie since it won Best Picture.  Cries of homophobia plagued the Academy, but the movie Crash itself doesn’t represent any contradiction to LGBTQ rights.  It’s its own message movie that unfortunately gave the wrong message at the wrong time.  But as flawed as it is, it’s nowhere the worst Best Picture winner of all time.  There’s even a more egregiously tone deaf movie about race that took the Best Picture prize more recently with the film Green Book (2018).  Crash gets away a lot more with it’s shallow depiction of racial issues, because it’s ultimately harmless fiction.  Green Book on the other hand whitewashes the story of real people to make it look like the white character was more tolerant than he was in real life.  While Green Book’s depiction of racial issues may be more ethically dubious, it still is reflective of the same faults that Crash has, in that it’s coming from a one-sided, white male perspective that doesn’t have the nuanced insight of people who actually face real racism everyday.  The movies may mean well, but it also is observing the issue from the perspective of people who are least likely to face the actual repercussions of racial injustice.  The same critique could also be leveled at Brokeback Mountain too, because that film was written, directed and starring cisgender straight people who don’t have first hand knowledge about the gay experience.  However, there was a deeper sense of empathy felt in Brokeback Mountain that helped the movie feel genuinely truthful about the persecution that it’s queer characters faced.  Crash by comparison is heavy handed and unsubtle, and it undermines it’s message in the long run.  The backlash it faced may be a bit harsh, but it’s also understandable.

In the end, Crash’s sole noteworthy accomplishment is that it pulled off one of the biggest Oscar night upsets.  But, it came at a price, because now it is viewed as an unworthy recipient of that award.  While I wouldn’t disagree that Crash is not exactly the best choice for Hollywood’s top honor, I also wouldn’t say it deserved the severe backlash it received either.  It’s naïve, but ultimately harmless, and in some moments actually elevates to being better than just okay.  Divorced from the Oscars, I think the movie would’ve garnered a better reputation over the years.  Like so many movies before at the Oscars,  it is over-shadowed by the runner-up, which has eclipsed it many times in popularity and importance.  The Oscars are a snapshot in time, and Crash’s win is an interesting look back at a time when the crossroads of gay rights and racial politics intersected in our pop culture and spurred on a renewed conversation about the necessity of cinema to shed light on injustice in this world.  Brokeback Mountain may have benefitted from it’s runner-up status, as it shifted focus more onto the issues of the LGBTQ community as Hollywood was trying to make amends for passing them over at the Oscars.  Queer representation only grew stronger in the decade since, and in 2017, it was a queer themed film called Moonlight that pulled off the upset, and over a self-indulgent movie about Hollywood that the Oscar voters tend to prize more than others.  Crash on the other hand is remembered more as an infamous misstep by the Academy.  But it’s not a horrendous movie by any means, and it certainly is less insulting about racial issues than Green Book is.  You see these movies that rise up with momentum at just the right time, and then are forgotten to time quickly thereafter, with only the Best Picture win to give them any note of worth.  Crash is definitely that kind of movie, only the backlash it faced was stronger than most others.  20 years after it’s release, it’s still a movie that carries a lot of baggage with it.  But, let’s not forget that it won the Best Picture race in a fair fight.  It should be noted that it was widely praised in it’s day; critic Roger Ebert even named it his Top Movie of the 2005 that year.  Time has a funny way of changing perspective on things, and in the years since Crash beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars, I’m happier that attitudes have shifted more towards gay rights and less towards lip-service gestures towards race relations in America.