Crash-lash

I'm officially adding my voice to the backlash (or "Crash-lash" as it's now being called) against Crash's best-picture Oscar win.

It's baffling to think Crash was voted the best movie in 2005. Not only did it not deserve to win, it didn't even deserve to be nominated. Crash was one of the most unoriginal and simplistic analyses of race in America I've ever seen. The characters were nothing more than one-dimensional stereotypes. They weren't even characters. They were caricatures.

Crash is not a serious film about race. It's an uninspired after-school-special about race with an ending so tidy it makes me want to vomit.

Or, as J.T. of Parkdale Pictures says, "It was like a bad liberal lecture driven by the utterly absurd premise that the only way people in LA relate to one another - and thus address hang ups of race - is by crashing their cars. No, the only way it happens is if racist cops pull a black guy out of his car and beat him to near death. That gets people talking."

So how did Crash end up winning the Oscar for best picture? It's no secret that the Academy loves to honour "progressive" or "controversial" movies so it can be seen as a forward-thinking organization.

But there's a catch. These films can't be so progressive or controversial that they're not palatable to the masses. Which is why the Academy ends up honouring middlebrow crap like Crash. That's my theory, anyway.

"The truth is that Crash is a perfect selection for the Academy because it's the type of film that makes white Americans feel guilty, but not too guilty, about that country's racial divide," my film buff friend Dan Brown surmises.

One last thing . . . it irks me that Paul Haggis stole the name of the film from David Cronenberg's darkly erotic movie about people who get off by crashing their cars. That Crash is a great film. This one isn't.