Finally! An opinion on the hot topic of the 2006 Oscar race!

Okay, I finally saw Crash last night. I'd had the DVD from Netflix for three weeks and thought, well, if I ever want to get the next diskful of Smallville episodes, I'd better watch this thing. One of the reasons I'd wanted to see it was, of course, I'd wondered if the movie had really deserved the "Best Picture" Oscar that it got--by surprise--over Brokeback Mountain. Now my questions have been answered:
NO, IT DIDN'T. THIS MOVIE SUCKED.
(Did you hear me in the back row?)
I'm not saying that every queerish movie needs its Oscars--I mean, Transamerica isn't really all that--but ferchrissake, Brokeback Mountain had Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Ang Lee and all these wonderfully talented people writing and directing (so that when the good acting started, we could appreciate it). Crash has good acting--a bit--but a script so crappy that it's like watching great actors having to rise above the play your seventh-grader wrote about racial stereotypes for her civics class.

Let's talk about gender here, too, and sexuality. Crash is a lovely antidote to any anxieties Straight Guys in Power(TM) might have about their "l'il straight guy." In Los Angeles, apparently, everybody (regardless of race and class) is straight. Vigorously straight, in the "man-on-top" sorta way. A notable example, from one of the central threads in the film: The couple that Officer Ryan pulls over and abuses? Woman had her head in her man's lap. For this offense, Officer Ryan "emasculates" the guy by feeling up his wife in front of him. The woman, later, tells her husband that she feels sorry for him because he didn't have the power to stop things. That's right, it's his tragedy (and she's only there to be the vehicle for both her husband's humiliation and, later in the film, Officer Ryan's "redemption" anyway).

Go ahead--you play. How many women in the movie have jobs and lives of their own? When they have jobs, how many of them are caretaking jobs, like "maid," or "junior partner who is there to watch the emotional struggle of her man," or "assistant to Brendan Fraser who has no lines of her own?"

Two final thoughts:
(1) It's nice that white straight liberals can assuage their guilt about racism/prejudice by voting for the movie that legitimates the class/gender/sexuality system that keeps them on top (more on this at AlterNet); and
(2) Of course, this all begs the question of whether the Academy Awards are ever really believable indicators of merit.

Okay, enough. I'm still on my first cup of coffee and I have to go get my annual mammygram. But go see Brokeback Mountain. Or see it again. It's really a good movie, even as good as the Proulx story that it's based on.