So, am I the only one in the world who didn't think Crash was that surprising a win for this year's Best Picture Oscar? Sure it came out quite early in the year, but it certainly wasn't dead on arrival come Oscar night, like many nominees stretched across the categories. Everyone was still talking about it.... it did, after all, make it on quite a few lists of the best films of 2005.
The media is having a field day calling Crash a surprise win. They're probably aching to call something a surprise because all the other high profile catgeory winners were unabashedly not surprising. Crash was just as polarizing (some people really loved it, others really hated it) and just as "controversial" (ugh) as the expected frontrunner, Brokeback Mountain (but hey, Ang Lee won Best Director, and that idiotic guitar score sailed its was to winning Best Original Score). They're both good dramas, but for very different reasons: they're telling different kinds of stories, they're trying to do different things. That said, I will argue that a movie like Crash is a more difficult feat to pull off, given its labyrinthine interconnections and mammoth cast.
There have been bigger upsets in the past (like Shakespeare in Love taking out Saving Private Ryan in the parking lot for the Best Picture Oscar of 1998), so to make this one look like a shocking event is just too self-indulgent. Thank god this awards season of just-okay movies is finally over.
UPDATE (03/07/2006): Roger Ebert zeroes in on this issue too, and doesn't disappoint.
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1 comment:
Crash was my pick all along, no surprise here... I though Brokeback 'the gay film' hype did it in. Personally I was fed up with everyone making note of that as if gays haven't been in movies before
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