10 Best Picture Oscar Winners That Aged Terribly

Unlike a lot of the other entries on the list, Crash has aged woefully, not so much because of massive social changes, but because it’s just a pretty bad film. It is the only other film that comes up as often as Braveheart does in discussions around what is the ‘worst best picture’, which makes sense. Because much like Braveheart, Crash feels like a parody of a film, rather than the real thing.

In the same way that Braveheart feels like a film within a film, Crash is so crushingly heavy-handed in its dealing with issues of race that you have to assume it’s taking the mick.

The narrative absurdity is one thing – but its discussions of race feel like they come from a film being produced in the late 1960s, by white people that had only just figured out that racism might be a bad thing. It’s so obvious and clunky that it feels like repeatedly getting hit in the face with a sign that says ‘racism is bad!’

Crash is emblematic of an era where Academy Awards voters were at their easiest to manipulate with over the top sentiment, and images that felt profound, but were anything other. It feels like a civics lesson from a dumber and more ignorant time, that has much less to say about the issues of race in America than it thinks it does.

When you compare it to some of the more recent films that deal with race as a complex and multifaceted issue (like Selma, and 12 Years a Slave, for example) it feels uncomfortably out of touch, and naïve.