I didn’t watch the Academy Awards last night, except to turn it on for about 3 seconds just as the best picture award was given. I have to admit I don’t get the Crash appeal. I watched the film several months ago, at the recommendation of one of my interns, expecting to see a film grappling with the subtleties of contemporary racist idolatries.
With its often laughably unsubtle dialogue about race, the movie, though, struck me as a better-financed version of the preachy “After School Specials” I watched as a child. Those of you who are thirtysomethings know exactly what I am talking about: “As you know, Jason, we’re going to secretly smoke this marijuana even though our parents would never approve, and statistics show it can lead to brain damage. But soon, we’ll have the power…to rule…the world. HA HA HA HA.” Sorry, I may be confusing part of this with a Legion of Doom scene from “Superfriends.” But you get the point.
There’s a film to be made about how the triumph of the civil rights movement has driven racist attitudes underground, made bigotries more veiled and more deceptive. Crash, in my view, actually covers up racist attitudes because it pictures them in such unrealistically obvious settings. How many educated white males in southern California tell an African-American woman on the telephone, “I might have guessed your name is Shaniqua,” as Matt Dillon did in the film? Real racial animosity, like every other kind of sin, is more cunning than that…and less easy to film.
I think a movie uncovering twenty-first century racisms might be worthwhile. But, then again, I also thought Cinderella Man or Walk the Line should have won best picture…
