Every Best Picture Oscar Movie Winner Of 21st Century Ranked Worst To Best

What should have won: Brokeback Mountain. 

What's easy to forget about Crash - one of the most hated of Best Picture winners - is that it's actually compelling in its craftmanship. In particular, Michael Muro's cinematography is rousing, its score moving, and many of its performances, from a star-studded cast far above the material, are assured. 

Unfortunately, Crash, much like Green Book over a decade later, is also a simplistic, antiquated exploration of racism and class struggle that offers little sincerity, fumbling its many contrived plotlines whilst reducing its themes to often insensitive, underexplored plot twists. 

Crash wants to say something big and meaningful, but its intentions are jumbled by its bleak yet simplistic worldview, which allows the worst of its characters to find undeserved redemption. Some of the cast overcome these issues - a weathered Don Cheadle and Thandiwe Newton notable highlights - but only in stops and starts, and even the best of them eventually suffocated by Crash's manipulative, dreary execution. It's difficult to recall a Best Picture winner this technically impressive yet frustratingly hollow.