The movies I like almost never win Oscars. I let it go. Doesn't bother me. But when something this bad wins the best American movie of the year I can't help it - this sucks. Maybe even more irritiating was the fact that it won for best original screenplay over Syriana and The Squid and the Whale. The writing in Crash is very obviously written by someone far outside the reality of almost all of its characters. At no time did I feel like I was seeing real stories or real people. This was completely imaginary play time bullshit written by a rich white guy in some big house in Beverly Hills. And on top of that we crown the chick from Legally Blonde as our best actress. Great. Below is a review I wrote on this movie when I saw it in October.

Crash – There are probably two things that I hate most in movies A) Filling out the cast with stock Hollywood actors trying to "get real" and this movie is overflowing with them. In fact the two best actors in the film are an unknown (the Mexican locksmith) and a rapper (Ludacris). B) The circle of random coincidence, wherein the audience is asked to swallow one ridiculous coincidence after another. The suspension of disbelief that this movie asks us to use is enormous. LA is not Iowa. You don't just run into people... The series with the gunshot, the little girl, the invisible cloak and the blanks is a nice moment but the rest of the film is lacking the same well-played subtlety, in fact it's blatant to the point of being offensive. Real people just don't talk like this. Terrence Howard is able to transcend some of the bad material but most of the others are not. I mean, I wasn't exactly impressed that Sandra Bullock can play a stuck up bitch or surprised that Ryan Phillippe doesn't make a convincing cop. And while it may be admirable to try and look at prejudice in a real light when you do that from behind a massive studio budget with a script openly campaigning for another Oscar it just cheapens the pursuit. Poor work all around.