10 Greatest Ever Oscar Shocks

Taken in isolation, Crash is a mediocre movie. There are some strong performances and an admirable sense of ambition, but it’s heavy handed in its message, and simplistic with it. As a Best Picture winner? It’s nothing short of crazy.

Writer/director Paul Haggis clearly had his heart in the right place in trying to make a major movie about racism, but he misses the mark badly. Crash has very little insight to offer on the subject of racism, other than that it takes many forms and is bad. None of the individual strands of the anthology piece would be too bad on their own, but they come together to form something worse than the sum of their parts as a multitude of bigoted characters have their broadly racist views challenged in the city of Angels.

Making matters worse, far better films – most notably Brokeback Mountain – were up for the big prize that year. Hollywood dinosaurs Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine refused to watch Ang Lee’s powerful drama out of rank homophobia, making it all the more disappointing that this bland morality piece scooped the top gong.