It’s one of my top five favorite movies of all time, so I guess people’s tastes differ. Man, it’s so good.
(Others near the top include O Brother Where Art Thou?, Quiz Show, About a Boy, and Groundhog Day, in case you want a list of movies to avoid.)
I thought *Crash *(2004) was terrible, but getting upset about the fact that it used the same name as Cronenberg’s film is silly. As Little Nemo pointed out, it happens all the time, and the average moviegoer probably has no idea that Cronenberg’s Crash even exists. And–as a Cronenbeg fan–I wouldn’t call his movie a masterpiece. I liked it–found it really interesting and well-made actually–but not a masterpiece.
And Brokeback Mountain wouldn’t have been my choice to win in 2004 either. I think it’s another film that people rate too highly because of the message, and not because of the film itself. I thought Good Night, and Good Luck and Munich were both better choices that year.
i know it’s fashionable to bash Crash, but I thought it was pretty good.
Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient and Out of Africa all sucked ass. *
Chicago* too.
Forrest Gump and Crash are deeply flawed movies. Accept that people might have simply disliked them not as an affectation or due to ideological blindness, but simply because they found them to be ham-handed and overly sentimental (Gump) or preachy and dumb (Crash).
I think I just realized that (in this thread) I’m been conflating Crash with Babel in my head. Note to self: Brad Pitt was not in Crash.
I probably would have voted for Munich over Crash but I still think it’s unfairly bashed.
Magnolia did it better.
So did Traffic.
Is it just me, or do a lot of the movies that come up over and over in these conversations tend to fall into the general category of “movies that people think are too girly”? I mean, I don’t think that’s particularly true of Forrest Gump (or Crash, as far as I know), but an awful lot of the others seem to be love stories, or slow-paced character-driven dramas, or both. I never see people complaining about, say, Braveheart winning over Sense and Sensibility.
Oh, and as much as it pains me to say it when it’s the only Shakespeare adaptation that’s ever won, I nominate Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet as one of the worst winners ever. Very visually pretty, but SO not a good version of Hamlet.
Well, they edited down to a nub, but I liked the performance. His Richard III was better (and one of the best acting performances I’ve seen, and the best Shakespeare performance I’ve seen).
Interesting perspective on the girly movies. I think you’re probably onto something, especially because it’s usually men who discuss these things at length and generate lists. Many of the “great” movies are masculine and action-oriented, like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc. Not that a movie is automatically taken seriously if it has action, but if it’s smart and has good characters it’s more likely to get rated highly as opposed to OK/good if it’s got action in it.
I’ll stand by Forrest Gump as a great movie until the day I die. It’s a weird twist, it’s a blockbuster that somehow zillions of people (in my humble opinion, of course) seem to have totally, completely missed the point of.
If you’re going to do a list of bad Best Picture choices I think that’s a hard call; I don’t for the life of me understand why anyone would say Shakepeare in Love was a bad choice, for instance, when it was, to my eyes, an absolutely sensational movie. I think the ones where you can make a good, objective case are ones in the past, because it gives us the benefit of the verdict of history to see whether the winner was ill-chosen. It’s kind of hard now to say Crash was a bad choice over Brokeback Mountain; for all we know Brokeback Mountain will, in 10 or 20 years, seem hackneyed and silly and nobody will understand why anyone was upset it didn’t win. Other choices are understandable at the time; people bitch about Annie Hall over Star Wars, but
But going back, there are a few that really strike you as being bizarre picks. “Oliver!” is inexplicable, at least to me. Seriously? That was the BEST PICTURE of the year? I’d be shocked if it was the best picture released within six weeks of its premiere.
Still, there aren’t many. I’m going back over the winners and for long stretches of time, I think “I might not totally agree with this pick, but it’s not a bad choice. I can’t say the voters really blew it.” Starting with “Oliver!” and working forward there isn’t a choice I can confidently say I know in my heart was absolutely, no doubt about it poor choice until “Chariots of Fire.” That’s 13 years.
No, it’s not just you - I’ve noticed it too. Reality shows like John and Kate + 8 are routinely dismissed as exploitative and staged, but Pawn Stars has its legions of fans here… even though it’s even more exploitative and staged than J+K+8. Musicals are routinely dismissed as unrealistic (“Nobody sings and dances on a whim in real life”) while traditional guy movies are completely given a pass (face it: Nobody gets into shootouts ala Heat or The Town in real life either).
And don’t even get into romances, which are universally reviled as being “trite” and “unoriginal” by the very same people who go all apeshit about comic book movies.
(The above is totally IMHO. Calls for cites will be ignored.)
To be fair, film adaptations of Shakespeare are one of the things that bring out my obnoxiously picky side, and I guess Olivier just isn’t my cup of tea. (I did like him in King Lear, but he didn’t direct it.)
I’d never heard anyone diss Chariots of Fire until this thread. I’m befuddled.
Nope, just plain hated it. Brokeback was okay but I was rooting for Munich that year.
Though I realize you mentioned later that you may have been conflating it with Babel, which I haven’t seen.
Wow. It’s not that bad. I mean, Twilight has to be worse than that, I should think.
I also agree that Out of Africa is horrible. An actively boring, hostile movie that should have not been released without major reshoots and editing.
And a naked Reese Witherspoon, let’s not forget. 
I also hate forrest gump. The problem for me was how Jenny treated Gump. “Hey Gump, let’s get married when I’m about to die and nobody else will touch me because I’ve got AIDS!” I think Jenny is one of the most horrible characters ever made.
Good point about Gone with the Wind, but 1939 was a year when any of them could have won. It’s considered possibly the best year in film ever.
For all of you Crash haters-
If you take out the forced gay sex scene, Brokeback Mountain is reduced to a Montana Travelogue; hardly worth an Oscar mention.
Unless you live in Sandpoint, Idaho or Bensonhurst, you can’t tell me that the events in Crash do not happen in your neighborhood.
That’s not it, IMO, but it’s kind of it. I disagree with a lot of the Academy’s choices, but it’s not because they’re girly per se, it’s because they’re dreck that middle aged housewives like. It’s kind of the same thing, but not. Look at the last decade and a half of Best Actress winners and tell me that your (hypothetical perhaps) tea-cozy knitting aunt’s favourite actresses aren’t on there. Same with the last fifteen years of Best Picture winners. I think rom-coms are girly, and bad, but people rarely pretend otherwise. I think Slumdog Millionare and *Crash *and A Beautiful Mind and *Shakespeare in Love *are sappy dreck, and garbage, but people pretend they are good - pretend they are the best film released that entire year, even, that no other film was better. So I think it’s more that mawkish sentimentality that bothers people more than girlyness, once you make the distinction.