For the past 20 years, Crash has been on the lips of everybody on the Internet and movie critics (both professional and amateur) as the “Worst Movie To Win Best Picture Oscar.”
This is like calling Plan 9 From Outer Space the worst movie ever made. There have been a lot of movies that came before and a helluva lot more that have been released in the many decades since. Do people remember that Grand Hotel won back in the early 1930s but never had a nomination in any other category? Or what about Harvey Weinstein’s Shakespeare in Love or Chicago?
I think most of the hostility toward this movie is that it beat out Brokeback Mountain which was considered a sure thing. The Academy has been criticized for refusing to acknowledge a movie about two gay men as Crash is considered pretentious Oscar bait that focuses more on race/culture relations.
Well, Brokeback Mountain is also pretentious Oscar bait. I’ve always been of the opinion that subject matter and even existence doesn’t equal excellence. That is probably the reason Sterlin Harjo abruptly ended Reservation Dogs knowing that he couldn’t squeeze another season out of a series based solely on the fact that it has a predominantly Indigenous Native American cast. Also, Brokeback was not the first movie to have two main gay characters. There’s The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, Making Love, Longtime Companion, Jeffrey, Torch Song Trilogy, Love! Valour! Compassion! and even Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. It also wasn’t the first movie to be nominated for Best Picture that had positive roles for gay characters.
I’d also argue that neither Heath Ledger’s Ennis del Mar nor Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist are gay by definition. I think Jack is bisexual as he enjoyed both men and women. Jack may have only enjoyed sex with men but didn’t want to be with another man in a relationship. However, Ennis is totally straight but he found an attraction to Jack and Jack alone. I mean neither character is totally gay as they both get in marriages to women played by Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway.
I can also argue Williams gives one of the worst performances of her career as she spends most of her screentime acting like someone who just walked in on her grandparents having sex with her parents and the family dog. And when Hathaway has to talk to Ennis about Jack’s death, it some of the worst acting of her career. Yet, Ang Lee won a fucking Oscar for Best Director. But I feel the Oscar win was more about Lee’s ability to rebound after the mixed reaction to his 2003’ Hulk.
Shamelessly, the movie resorts to the same stereotypes of some of the movies I mentioned above that only focus on gay men as long as they die at the end. The ending implies that Jack is murdered because it is discovered he was gay and probably fucked David Harbour. There’s also some suspicion that Hathaway’s Lureen might have been involved in orchestrating it. In other words, it’s OK to make a movie about gay men as long as “they pay for their sins” either from slowly dying from AIDS or being murdered.
What sucks is that Linda Cardinelli was overlooked for her more impressive and more realistic performance as Cassie Cartwright who strikes up a relationship with Ennis after he divorces Williams’ Alma. To be honest, I hated Williams’ Alma and I didn’t care for Kate Mara’s wooden performance as Ennis’ grown daughter. But Cardinelli takes what could’ve been a throwaway performance come late in the second half and nails it. Cassie seemed to love Ennis a lot more than Alma ever did as the latter saw it more as a marriage of convenience which makes Ennis’ rejection of Cassie so more heartbreaking.
It also exemplifies what should’ve been the tone of the movie that love has to be equally shared for a relationship to survive. Jack couldn’t walk away from his marriage to Lureen but also couldn’t be totally faithful to Ennis. Yet, Ennis is struggling with his own love for Jack as he feels he must date and marry women to be a real man. Moonlight, which won in 2017, did a better job at this.
Homophobia was blamed for the movie’s failure to snag the Best Picture Oscar. But at about 134 minutes with credits, it feels a lot longer. It also seems to suggest we should only care about gay men because they face a lot of prejudice and hatred.
Also, the cast and crew are still straight. Lee is straight. Gyllenhaal is straight. Ledger, may he rest in peace, was straight. Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story on which the movie is based, is straight. Larry McMurtry, may he rest in peace, who co-wrote the screenplay, was straight. Only Diana Ossanna, who also co-wrote the script, has kept her personal life private.
So, just like Love, Simon, it’s really just a softball movie by heterosexual people about gay people for other heterosexual people. I feel sorry for any gay man who’s been given the evil eye because they admitted publicly they didn’t like this movie. I played the drums/percussion in high school and I hate Whiplash with a passion.
Now, the argument was that Academy voters like Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis refused to watch the movie. And Ossana said last year that she spoke with Paul Haggis, who won Best Picture Oscar for Crash, that Clint Eastwood, another voter, hadn’t seen the movie either. So, what? Are we to assume that people that didn’t see or even vote for Brokeback cast their votes for Crash? Maybe they voted for Munich, Capote or Good Night, and Good Luck. And I think these votes for the other movies is what led to Crash narrowly moving ahead of Brokeback.
Also, I think some of the pre-Oscar awards attention to Brokeback hurt it more than helped it. Poulx, who always looks like she’s about to call 911 on anyone non-white she sees or is about to read the Riot Act to the manager, went on the war path saying Brokeback should’ve won because it won other awards. Well, no. Brokeback had won at the Golden Globes as well as Felicity Huffman for Transamerica. But the voters at the Globes are the same voters at the Oscars and other awards committees.
Also, you don’t hear anything about how Huffman didn’t win at the Oscars even though Phillip Seymour Hoffman won for his performance as Truman Capote, a gay man. Ironically, all movies would be heavily criticized today as Huffman, a cisgender woman, plays a transgender woman, and Hoffman, may he rest in peace, was straight. And I think if Brokeback had more of imput from the gay-male community, it might not have looked so Hallmarkian. The funniest scene is when Randy Quaid, who definitely isn’t gay, spots Ennis and Jack have a little fun time running around with their shirts off and just assumes they’ve been fucking. I mean, he was right. But you could also say the same thing about guys at the beach. Just because you see two or more men walking around with their shirts off doesn’t mean they’re gay. More than likely, they’re showing off.
For anyone who had seen the 1997 movie In and Out, it feels like the fake movie To Serve and Protect about gay soldiers. Matt Dillon plays a straight actor Cameron Drake who plays a gay character who outs his English teacher, played by Kevin Kline, when he wins an Oscar. It’s totally pandering to a straight audience and Paul Rudnick who wrote the movie seems to target primarily Philadelphia as playing a gay man because the equivalent of a Simple Jack by the late 1990s.
That being said, if Crash had been released a few years earlier or a few years later, it would’ve been seen in a different light. To be honest, it’s a lot more honest movie about prejudices and the ignorance surrounding it. Dillon got a real Oscar nomination in a wonderful performance playing a LAPD officer who abuses his authority toward black people but really is helpless to get care for his ailing father. Sandra Bullock plays a rich white woman whose Karen attitude is justified and she’s supposed to chill because it’s not politically correct for his husband, played by Brendan Fraser whose the D.A. Also, the movie mocks the white savior motif of having Ryan Phillipe playing the more lenient young idealist cop who is just as quick to assume Larenz Tate’s Peter is going to pull a gun on him.
The L.A. area, like many metropolitan areas, consists of many people of different skin colors, religions and cultural backgrounds but they spend too much time keeping themselves separated. And this creates
Twenty years ago, America, itself was far more ignorant believing that racism was over and done with even when we were involved in two wars in the Middle East. Growing up in the South, the movie seemed to finally show that no one stops and talks with other people for five minutes. Peter laughs when he sees that Phillipe’s Tom also places a St. Christopher statuette on the dash of his car. Both men come from different backgrounds. Tom is a cop and Peter is a petty criminal.
Then Barack Obama became the Democrat frontrunner for President and he was then elected. It became pretty much obvious that many people in America were a lot more racist and prejudice than they’d like to admit. Worse, Prop 8 in California in 2008 proved that black people are more homophobic than we’d like to admit to as it passed mostly on the high turnout for Obama.
So, yes, while voters in one of the largest populated states were voting favorably for the first non-white President, they were also perfectly ok with saying same-sex couples shouldn’t marry. Maybe we shouldn’t blame the Oscar voters alone, because it seemed they were peas in the same pod with the regular people of California.
Also, since 2006, there have been a number of movies that have won that have been forgotten the next day after the ceremony. Remember The King’s Speech, The Artist, Birdman, Green Book, Nomadland, or CODA?
Even before 2006, we had The English Patient and Forrest Gump beat out more popular and longer lasting movies like Fargo, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption. It seems to be a no-win situation. Just like Do the Right Thing, Brokeback is still only talked about because it didn’t win.
But just like Eastwood said to Gene Hackman, may he rest in peace, at the end of Unforgiven “Deserves got nothing to do with it.” I’d also argue if someone attempted to remake Brokeback today, it wouldn’t be met with the same accolades. Actually, it was remade a few years ago by Pedro Almodovar with Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke as gay cowboys and called Strange Way of Life, a short movie that is currently streaming on Netflix.
Didn’t hear about it? I’m not surprised.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 