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Crash can't really beat Brokeback ... can it? Laws and Sausages

by Karina Longworth Feb 24th 2006 // 12:01PM

Filed under: Drama, Gay & Lesbian, Independent, Awards, Lionsgate Films, RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy, Box Office, Focus Features, Newsstand, Politics, Oscar Watch, Cinematical Indie



It's a joke we've heard before: those who enjoy either Laws or Sausages should watch neither being made. It's a rule that also easily applies to the contemporary film industry. In other words, here's my scary little industry column - check back once a week, if you dare.

Perhaps the mainstream media can sleep safely after all. For all the hysteria swirling around about how the blogosphere was destined to ruin Oscar season with our obsessive prognostication, I think there’s a kind of studied, hipster-esque detachment going around the film blogs that’s worth paying attention to. How many blog posts have you read in the past month that start something like, “The Oscars are obviously totally worthless, but …”? The fact that the only answer to that question is “more than one” is sign enough that we have some kind of an epidemic on our hands.

So while the MSM Venn diagrams the hell out of the hype surrounding Brokeback Mountain and Crash, and each journalist worth his weight in pullquotes picks a circle and jerks away, I think it’s worth noting that neither film has seemed to interest the blogging rabble until some time this week. It’s evidence that someone is out of touch – although I’m not sure if it’s them or us – that the most interesting and impassioned critical discussion I’ve read on film blogs this awards season instead seems to center around Terrence Malick’s The New World, which, outside of multiple fawn-jobs by Manohla Dargis, has drawn virtually zero mainstream attention. However you chicken-or-egg the relationship between the Academy and the press, The New World is, of course, not nominated for Best Picture, and due to the perceived wisdom on Academy politics, it’s considered a long shot in the Cinematography category, the sole race in which it's been deemed worthy to compete. Tedium over these political guessing games no doubt lies at the heart of the apathy epidemic (whether, on a case by case basis, that apathy is genuine or feigned) - which makes it all the more noteworthy that it’s that exact political miasma that has finally caused the blog troops to rally around the flag.

I’m pretty sure it started last Friday when Dave Carr (blogging for the New York Times as The Carpetbagger, which has improved considerably since I was caught on tape calling it "dismal" in December) passed along the following tidbit culled from a phone call with a ballot-in-hand member of the Academy: 
“The caller, like a lot of people that he talks to in Los Angeles, said he would be giving Crash his best picture vote, not Brokeback Mountain. The man said he had no problem with the gay themes at the heart of the Ang Lee film, but just that he found he saw the film as highly derivative of Douglas Sirk’s films in the 1950’s of thwarted love between doomed souls. “I just found Crash to be a far more original movie.” He said that he would have liked to have been voting for a big studio movie – he used to be part of one of its hulking components – but “they just didn’t give us anything to choose from this year.”

We can understand his frustration, can’t we? Wouldn’t we all be slightly less depressed about the state of the industry if Hollywood were making more films that were … you know …  good? Or, at the very least, worthy of being awarded miniature gold nude men (knowing that the two are not exactly always symmetric)? But the very idea that Brokeback Mountain – a “sure thing” since November, and, perhaps most surprising, an unquestionably solid work of art – could be vulnerable to Paul Haggis’ intolerable intolerance play seems to be just a little too much to handle. I think Anthony Kaufman – whose blog has really broken out in recent weeks as one to watch – was the first to take the anger to the streets:

“What's with all this gossip about Crash gaining momentum to upset Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture Oscar? Is anyone buying this? Why am I even wasting my time addressing this topic? It's not like the Oscars frequently recognize what I deem to be worthy movies, anyway, but please, this rumor has to be stopped before it becomes even a whiff of a reality,… [re: the voter testimony] Jesus fucking Christ, perhaps the Crash movement isn't all that impossible when senile dullards like this guy make up the Academy's membership.”

If Kaufman’s incredulity over a potential Crash party crash seems a bit incredible, the NYT’s Dave Kehr shows up in the comments with evidence that hurts:

“Anthony,
I'm in LA this week and I'm hearing the "Crash" thing too from just abut everyone I know. The usual explanation is that NYers just don't understand how explosive the racial situation is out here, plus the fact that there are an awful lot of actors in it, and actors are the largest and most passionte voting bloc." [typos Kehr's]

It’s Kehr’s first contention that's really troubling, I think – the idea that white, LA-based Oscar voters think that by voting for Crash, they can absolve themselves over whatever guilt they feel over mistreating their gardeners or obstinately refusing to send their children to public school. Or, as Dargis put it in the paper she shares with Kehr several weeks ago:

"What could better soothe the troubled brow of the Academy’s collective white conscious than a movie that says ... all answers are basically simple, so don’t even think about politics, policy, the lingering effects of Proposition 13 and Governor Arnold."

After all, it’s easier for even the staunchest aesthete to swallow their pride and mark a check box than to get out of the Navigator and enact any sort of real social change. A reasonable enough assumption, I suppose, although probably ultimately misguided. I lived in Los Angeles for almost 20 years, and I never saw any brand of racial conflict that a bad film could resolve.

For those who have not yet had the pleasure, Crash is a science fiction film, set in an alternate universe that looks suspiciously like Los Angeles. This mythic dimension is populated exclusively by about a dozen men and women of various races and ethnicities; their only common trait, the compulsion to speak in stilted expository paragraphs. Singularly unintelligent and consumed with racially-motivated hatred, this crew has been cursed to encounter one another over and over again through easily preventable traffic incidents. In the film’s most compelling narrative knot, the District Attorney of Los Angeles (played by Brendan “Encino Man” Fraser; he apparently ran on a campaign devoted to “ample nugs, grindage, and minimal weezing on the juice”) has his car jacked by two black youths. The stolen SUV apparently has time shifting properties, for soon the two men find themselves in the 1860s, where they run over a "Chinaman" who is presumably standing in the middle of the street whilst working on the railroad. In the end, we learn that women tend to cry and scream a lot, and people of opposite races, apparently, don't really get along. Also, when it comes to acting nominations, I know I'm not the only one who thinks Tony Danza was robbed.

In short, Anthony Kaufman is right: "Crash quite simply, is a mess." But even so: in the current bloggy climate, in which you apparently can’t get a TypePad account until you renounce any and all belief in the Academy and their taste in film, how and why did it suddenly become fashionable to speak out the second a bad film seems to be rising to Oscar Night glory?

I think my brothers and sisters in film snobbery know the deal is already done. I think Crash will win Best Picture, and not only that – I predict that Brokeback Mountain will not win a single major award on Oscar night. And, quite frankly, I think that's for the best. Brokeback Mountain is a very good film, but its legacy has been threatened by the bizarre effect the film has had on pop culture. From the spoof trailers (Brokeback to the Future is only the tip of the iceberg – do a You Tube search) to the ubiquity of "I wish I knew how to quit you" – a devastating line when I saw the picture early last fall, I can't imagine anyone sitting through the scene the first time around by now and not bursting into laughter – this subtle, somber, truly apolitical romance has blown up into the event film of the year. It will cross the $100 million mark, far more than the Steven Spielberg film taking up space on the Oscar ballot; it will not win Best Picture. It's already done its job; this is the right time for it to start gracefully sliding into the historical ether. So come March 5, let's just let the big, gaudy message film-as-after school special win 100 little statues. Let's let Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser pretend to be serious actors; let's let the Academy congratulate themselves for making decisions approved by Oprah. Because, after all, we don't really care about the Oscars - right?

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Tags: academy awards, AcademyAwards, ampas, blogs, brokeback mountain, BrokebackMountain, crash, film blogs, FilmBlogs, oscars, paul haggis, PaulHaggis

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