In choosing this year's winner for Best Picture, the Academy makes a 'Crash'ing mistake

The Oscars. The Academy Awards. By whatever name you know the famous awards show of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, disregard it. The Academy has now officially proven itself to be synonymous with any of the most derogatory titles one could imagine. Sure, the festivities started off nice enough with "Wallace and Gromit" picking up a well deserved award for Best Animated Feature and "King Kong" winning recognition for its breathtaking effects. Although Amy Adams lost for Best Supporting Actress for her perfect performance in "Junebug," the show continued with its promising selections of Reese Witherspoon and Philip Seymour Hoffman as the best actors of the year. And then it was time for the big award.
The Best Motion Picture of the Year: "Crash." Really? The Academy wants us as viewers to accept the fact that "Crash" is the best motion picture of the year? Impossible. They want "Crash" to be remembered years from now alongside past winners such as the classic "The Sound of Music," the witty "Annie Hall," the heartbreaking "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the frightening "The Silence of the Lambs," the perfectly written "American Beauty" and even the recent epic spectacle "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." Does something sound odd about placing "Crash" alongside these films? It should. "Brokeback Mountain" was clearly the frontrunner and the film most worthy of the prestigious award. Even if it didn't win, "Crash" should not have been the one to take home the prize. Countless other movies should have been nominated instead. What about the visually wonderful "King Kong," which proved that remakes can be just as good as their originals? Or how about the unique "Match Point," which was Woody Allen's big comeback? Maybe "Walk the Line" could have been nominated, as it boasted two of the best performances of the year. Even the simple yet lovable "Junebug" could have filled the fifth slot for Best Picture for its pleasant and realistic look into the life of a southern family.
The Golden Globes had enough sense to award the Best Picture of the Year (Drama) to "Brokeback Mountain" and leave "Crash" off the nominated films list. The following groups also awarded "Brokeback Mountain" the top award of the year: the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, the London Critics Circle, the Vancouver Film Critics Circle and the Southeastern Film Critics Association. "Brokeback Mountain" also took home the Broadcast Film Critics Association Award, the Independent Spirit Award and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Picture.
Sure, the Academy has made some mistakes in the past. Some might say it was a mistake that "Citizen Kane," which many regard as the greatest film ever made, did not win Best Picture in 1941. I would mention other films such as "The Graduate," "The Last Picture Show," "Cries and Whispers," "Taxi Driver," "The Elephant Man," "ET" and "Fargo," which were all nominated for the top award but never won. The host of this year's awards even noticed some of the Academy's bizarre past choices by saying that director Martin Scorsese currently has zero Academy Awards and Three 6 Mafia has one.
But why did this happen this year? Did voters think "Brokeback Mountain" had already received enough attention? Could it have been too risqu? Maybe the Academy wanted the attention of selecting an underdog? Could it boost ratings in future years because they have now become harder to predict?
Here are some other reasons. "Crash," set against the backdrop of Los Angeles, the home of the Oscars, may have connected with more voters.
Maybe the Academy just felt that awarding a picture involving racial issues might have opened more people's minds and given the Academy that extra clout it needed to be seen as politically correct. Or maybe it was the fact that 130,000 DVD copies of "Crash" were sent to voters beforehand - an unheard of amount considering the norm is 12,000 to 20,000. This year's "King Kong," for instance, was rumored to have only mailed out about 8,000.
Maybe voters just didn't watch all of the five nominees, as might sometimes be the case since it is not necessary that the film be viewed at the theater. My guess is that, if anything, more and more people will begin to write off the Oscars as a group that throws a good party but has come to have a warped sense of what "Best Picture" truly means.
The Academy has now officially lost its credibility. Is "Crash" really the best our country has to offer when other countries look to America for examples of great films? Is something so forced, so exaggerated, so fake, so contrived and so manipulative really what we want to show them? Do we want to show them a picture in which every character is pushed to the absolute extremes of racial conflict just to get across an already well-known fact? Do we want to show them a film that claims to be so realistic, yet has some of the most stilted and pretentious dialogue of the year? Can we not paint them a picture of life's struggles with top-notch acting, fascinating cinematography and great direction? "Brokeback Mountain" had all of these, as its numerous nominations suggested. However, what is done is done, and many will still remember the true best pictures of the year compared to what actually took home the prize.