In case folks haven't figured it out yet, I am a fan of Pajiba (
www.pajiba.com). Now they have an article, "Eight Films That Shouldn't Have Won Best Picture." I won't post the whole article here, you can read it at
http://www.pajiba.com/eight-films-that-shouldnt-have-won-best-picture.htmbut I will post the entry for 2005. By and large I agree with the conclusions although as folks on this thread know, I am a fan of Titanic. Even so, it makes for could reading. Enjoy!
2005
Crash beats Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Munich, and Good Night, and Good LuckScratch that; this is the year I stopped trusting the Academy. This is the year I realized that they will still continue to award quality work in filmmaking, but only serendipitously, out of sheer happy coincidence. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was a tender, doomed love story, and became a cultural event larger than the film itself. Bennett Miller’s Capote was a stunning feature debut that revolved around Philip Seymour Hoffman’s amazing lead performance, which won the Best Actor award. Steven Spielberg’s Munich was the director’s most politically charged film in years, and showed he was still at the top of his class of film-school revolutionaries. George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck was an equally thought-provoking film, one where Clooney took a back seat to the story at hand and David Strathairn’s gripping turn as Edward R. Murrow. All of these films are good films, smart, strong, well-made films that deserve to be praised. But Paul Haggis’ Crash is just the kind of pseudo-intellectual dreck that finds itself atop the awards heap when all is said and done. It attacks the issue of modern-day racism with all the sophistication of a college freshman, never stopping to wonder if people fight each other because they’re lonely, or frustrated, or just plain assholes. If someone cuts you off in traffic, and you get upset, maybe it’s not because the driver’s a different race; maybe you just don’t like being cut off on the highway, you know? Haggis’ film soars past the usual level of manipulation filmmakers employ when telling a story and becomes something cheap, and unclever, and almost offensive in the haphazard way it pretends to talk about real issues. It’s not merely that Haggis made a clunky film about race; it’s that, in the midst of a turbulent war and with the memory of Sept. 11 still lingering over a generation, he abused the power he has a filmmaker to create something complex and tough and challenging and good and instead funneled into something tawdry and exaggerated and stereotypical and embarrassing. Movies can show us who we are, and what we want to be, and how far we sometimes have to go make up the difference, and Crash is the antithesis of all of that. Of the other four films nominated this particular year — and they’re all masterful films — perhaps Munich comes closest to dealing with the terrors we visit on each other and the price we pay for what we think is justice. But Spielberg’s film is a tough one, unwilling to compromise in its search for answers to the big questions, and that ultimately disqualified it from winning. Crash is slick, dumb, and full of answers, but no one seemed to care that they were the wrong ones.
Topic: Resurrecting the Movies thread... (Read 1190343 times)