“An exceptional film”: Roger Ebert’s unyielding admiration for cinema’s least deserving Oscar winner
The clue is in the name: the Academy Award winner for ‘Best Picture’ should be awarded to the year’s best picture. Obviously, that’s not how it works, although one of, if not the least deserving winner in the category’s history, found a vocal defender in Roger Ebert.
There have been several egregious snubs and daylight robberies at the Oscars over the last century, and it still boggles the mind that voters were adamant that Shakespeare in Love was a more deserving winner than Saving Private Ryan, although Harvey Weinstein did admittedly have a lot to do with that.
Even the director of Driving Miss Daisy admitted that it probably didn’t merit being named the finest feature to emerge from Hollywood in 1989, but they can’t hold a candle to the utter, industry-wide bemusement that followed when Paul Haggis’ Crash was declared ‘Best Picture’ in March 2006.
It wasn’t even universally acclaimed at the time, and in the two decades since, its reputation has only slid downward. Ten years later, and Haggis merely confirmed what everyone else already knew when he posed a hypothetical question and then immediately, and correctly answered it: “Was it the best film of the year? I don’t think so.”
Of the five nominees that year, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain should have won. Unfortunately, producer Diana Ossana began to realise that wasn’t the case when she discovered that many Academy members, citing Clint Eastwood in particular, hadn’t even bothered to watch it before casting their ‘Best Picture’ votes.
Ebert disagreed, though, definitively naming Crash as the best movie of the year, bar none, even when addressing the elephant in the room head-on. “Hopefully, the ‘debate’ about the quality of Paul Haggis’ Crash won’t rage on,” he wrote, even though it did. “For what it’s worth, I thought it was an exceptional film, even if, at times, the characters were archetypal.”
Even when acknowledging the Oscars controversy, he maintained his opinion. “I chose Crash as the best film of the year not because it promoted one agenda and not another, but because it was a better film,” he doubled down, with Ebert writing multiple op-eds defending Haggis’ film from the vociferous backlash.
As someone who made their living reviewing movies, Ebert was free to say whatever he wanted, and over the years, he awarded high marks to many awful, awful works of cinema. And yet, he became strangely obsessed with defending Crash over and over again, as if he felt compelled to repeatedly explain why the Oscars were right all along, and anyone who doubted its credentials was talking nonsense.
The simple fact remains that for the rest of recorded history, no conversation about the worst ‘Best Picture’ winners in history will be worth having unless Crash is hovering around the very top, even if Ebert was ready to die on the hill that it was a masterpiece.
