As I sat in my living room last Sunday and watched the 78th annual Academy Awards unfold, my usual Oscar temperament (attentive, but largely indifferent) was displaced by a feeling of casual intrigue. Although my favorite film of the year (Serenity, for those curious) was, not surprisingly, unrecognized, I had seen many of the heavy hitters that were up for major awards and was curious to see how the night would play out. However, just as I was considering these Oscars the smartest, most user-friendly in years (thank you, Jon Stewart), I bore witness to the complete and utter debacle that was the Best Picture award.

When Jack Nicholson announced Paul Haggis’ Crash as the best picture of the year, I was positively livid. I saw four of the five Best Picture nominees this year, and Crash was the only one that did not deserve its nomination. In fact, I was convinced that the four films I saw were inconsequential, because the one that I didn’t see, Brokeback Mountain, had the Best Picture category essentially locked up. Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich are all far superior films to Crash, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a moviegoer who found Crash more moving and emotional than Ang Lee’s groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain (unless, of course, you read the Muse’s pick for who should win the Best Picture award).

Curiously, some of the elements for which Crash has been critically acclaimed represent some of its most glaring blunders. The film’s ensemble cast, while touting some big names, doesn’t mesh nearly as well as the cast of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, for instance. In addition, using multiple, interwoven subplots to tell a story (as the film does) is no revolutionary technique. The plot structure of Crash actually hinders the storytelling, as Haggis relies primarily on the umbrella of “racial prejudice” to relate the subplots, rather than weave them through developed character relationships. (For genuinely impressive plot combination, see Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction). The cumulative effect of these errors is a segmenting of the story that makes the film feel more like an associative juxtaposition than a cohesive narrative.

It’s not that Crash is a bad movie, it’s just that it’s a painfully mediocre movie. I say “painfully” because the filmmakers could have made an outstanding film with their chosen premise, but the film they chose to make is so misdirected and disappointing that it hurts the movie fan in me. In a modern world that is incredibly fixated on racial tension and prejudice, an expository film about racial interaction seems just the ticket for moving audiences. But the film’s most egregious error is that it relies almost entirely on established racial stereotypes for storytelling and character relationships.

Good filmmakers will tell you that they make movies to tell stories. In Crash, it feels as if Paul Haggis and co. simply found a story, and forced it upon a public that was ripe to accept any manifestation of racially charged media. The film’s juxtaposition of characters and plotlines is grossly mishandled, such that the viewer’s initial reaction at film’s end is a tepid “Hmmph.” This lackluster impression results primarily from the film’s lack of character development. If you want to evoke any kind of emotion in me as a moviegoer, you damn well better make me care about the characters on screen. The problem with Crash is that it assumes all of its character relationships from the get-go, and makes almost no effort to further them. Granted, there’s tension and conflict, and some characters abandon their initial racial prejudices to self-sacrificial ends, but none of this “growth” feels genuine because Haggis does very little to make us care about the characters in the first place. Crash has been hailed as a film with which people from all races can identify, but the film ultimately tries too hard to cover every possible racial situation. The end result of this cinematic seine fishing is the absence of things like meaningful storytelling and character development, both integral components of a great film.

Ultimately, Crash is the kid at the party who tries too hard. You know the one. He’s that kid who’s got a beer in each hand who’s yelling at and high-fiving everybody. He’s saying different things to everyone there, so that that they’ll all think he’s really cool, but in actuality he has no real personality or unique qualities of his own. That’s Crash. It’s just saying what everyone wants to hear. It recognizes the concerns of a race-minded public and exploits them, thereby passing itself off as good cinema. Clever? Sure. But the Best Motion Picture of the year? I think not. Shame on you, Academy.

Dave Freeman, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences and School of Education, can be reached at [email protected].