Yeah, I know, maybe not ever. But this was a rare year in which I actually saw more than one of the movies nominated for Best Picture; I saw two, one excellent (”Good Night, and Good Luck”) and one abysmal (”Crash”). So of course, the abysmal one wins…and the really good one gets completely shut out of the awards. And Jon Stewart, though he started strong, wasn’t nearly as funny as he should have been. At least the Supporting Actor and Actress award winners were worthy; I didn’t see “Syriana,” though I will eventually, but George Clooney is always great in whatever he does, and Rachel Weisz was superb in the slight but effective “Constant Gardener.” (Ralph Fiennes was typically excellent also, though I guess it was too minor a movie for him to merit a Best Actor nomination.)
I don’t usually care much about award shows, though I almost always watch the major movie and TV and country music ones (I haven’t watched the Grammys in more than 25 years, and I find it surprising when people with similar musical tastes do watch them, because they have so little to do with most of what we listen to). As I said, it’s a rare year in which I’ve seen even one of the nominated films, because over the years I’ve become less and less of a moviegoer (or even DVD-watcher); somewhere along the line, I stopped being all that much of a movie fan. Besides, there’s usually other stuff on TV on Sunday nights, so that I miss most of the Oscar show. But this year I watched the whole thing, and I didn’t for one second believe that “Crash”—seriously one of the worst major motion pictures that I’ve ever seen—would win. I was sure it would be “Brokeback Mountain,” which cornered a majority of the other non-acting awards. I haven’t seen “Brokeback” and don’t have much desire to (mainly because it’s based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, whom I consider a truly dreadful writer, the worst sort of earnest middlebrow shlock with literary pretentions), but I’d have been much happier if it had won rather than “Crash.”
What’s so awful about “Crash”? Oh, I dunno. Is it the hamfistedness of its “message”? Is it the ugliness of every single one of the characters? Is it the way that it purports to make us confront our fears and prejudices while actually sort of glorifying them? Um, yeah. That and a whole bunch more. (And I like Paul Haggis, who created one of my favorite TV shows ever, “E-Z Streets”…though in retrospect, that show was pretty heavy-handed too. But it had a sense of dark humor, something that is completely lacking from “Crash”).
It’s hard for me to describe how much I hated “Crash,” from the very first scene on, and why, so I’ll let Andrew O’Hehir do it for me. From Salon:
Look, it’s not like “Crash” is a war crime or something. A lot of the acting is quite good, and the honorable intentions of this achingly earnest sermon (”Racial Pain: Los Angeles, America, the World?”) are obvious. But it’s exactly the kind of portentous, piss-elegant middlebrow trash that many critics (and, unhappily, many viewers) see as Important Cinema. The only difficult part about identifying the preaching and speech-making in “Crash” is finding the places when it stops. No one in this movie ever talks like an identifiable human being, starting with the notorious early scene where two young African-American men who are about to carjack the L.A. district attorney get into a philosophical argument about the prevalence of white racism. (I had high hopes for that scene when it appeared they might have to shoot Sandra Bullock’s eterna-whiny rich-bitch character. After that, it was all downhill.)
I should have just skipped the Oscars and watched “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (which I have out from Netflix at the moment) instead.