Three intriguing AM perspectives on the Best Picture win by Crash: David Poland acutely HotButtons why: “Crash is a valley movie. It is a film that was made by people who are, for the most part, longstanding members of the Hollywood (literally, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Burbank) community and the Academy is made up mostly of people who can also be described as the same. And in specific, all politics are local and the Academy race is nothing if not political. And with Cheadle-Dillon-Bullock-Fichtner-Esposito-Fraser-Howard-Phillippe-Sirtis-David-Danza-Tate-Ludicris-Newton all in play for longtime TV vet and recently film vet Paul Haggis on Crash vs. an Aussie, a young actress who worked mostly in North Carolina, a young New Yorker, and an even younger actress, who has made two films all working for a Chinese director who works with a guy in New York on Brokeback Mountain… well, you can add up the votes…” Back east, The Reeler spools some characteristic bile: “I face the migraine-inducing reality that what is so often hyped as the world’s most austere, powerful film body actually awarded its Best Picture prize to an abortion like Crash. I mean, I saw a half-dozen better films last year that were not even nominated, but I saw hardly any as intensely awful and overrated as Paul Haggis’s pedantic “drama”—as accurate an approximation of race relations as a Winnie the Pooh cartoon is an honest depiction of forest ecology. Yet Matt Zoller Seitz may have the title, from an extended entry before Sunday night’s win (I can hardly wait to see his reaction today) which I quote only in brief: “Haggis and the film’s defenders can pretend this is evidence of complexity and contradiction all they want; it’s really just evidence of Haggis’ version of Powerful Dramaturgy, which mixes the schematic earnestness of an old afterschool special and the Zen pulp grandiosity of Michael Mann in full-on existential dread mode, complete with pulsing synth music, massive telephoto closeups and time-suspending action montages. This movie should have been called “Mess.” But despite its pretensions to muscular lyricism, Crash doesn’t even deserve the top prize when judged as pure filmmaking. It’s nowhere near as brutishly powerful as Mel Gibson’s roundly sneered-at 1995 winner Braveheart—in my view, not really a historical movie as Oscar typically defines it, but the first atavistic action film to win Best Picture; the sort of movie Cornel Wilde would have directed if during the 1960s he’d been given tens of millions of dollars to throw around. Nor is Crash as good as The English Patient, a classy timewaster that almost nobody wants to watch twice… Unlike other recent Best Picture contenders, Crash isn’t slick, clever and safe, it’s hot, stupid and dangerous, and slick and “powerful” in that peculiarly West Coast way that used to be showcased on “Six Feet Under.” The characters chatter bitterly, like drunk screenwriters trying to one-up each other with demonstrations of hardboiled cynicism about life but then rallying at the last minute to exhort each other to go forth into the world and Make a Difference… Entertainment industry dumbasses… live in monocultural bubbles and experience race relations via news reports if they experience it at all [might] deem Crash a work of searing truth. If this movie wins Best Picture, the statutette should be headless.”

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