i see the crash hatred, which i expressed not so eloquently a while back, is thankfully spreading due to the fact that there are loud rumblings that it could win the best picture oscar this year. via amber, a couple excellent beat downs of the vapid film can be found here and here. quotes:

As your headline suggests, I wrote in the forum that Crash was among my least favorite movies of 2005 and called it "one of those self-congratulatory liberal jerk-off movies that roll around every once in a while to remind us of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices, and how, when the going gets tough, even the white-supremacist cop who gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is capable of rising to the occasion."

and

I realize the academy has been making lot of wafer-bland Best Picture choices since the 90s ("American Beauty," "Shakespeare in Love," "A Beautiful Mind," "Chicago"), honoring films that are slick and entertaining and perfunctorily "smart" but not the least bit resonant, films that don't hold a candle to at least 10 or 15 English language films from that same year that didn't win....Yes, I admit, the movie's more primally exciting than, say, "American Beauty" or "A Beautiful Mind" or "The English Patient," and more superficially "edgy." But it's also dumber and meaner and uglier, an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank. And it's lazy and simplistically cynical about its central subject, race, in that it promulgates a false idea of how Americans express racial attitudes in public. Cowritten by Haggis and Robert Moresco, "Crash" directly contradicts what we know about how race plays out in the U.S. today, not just in Los Angeles, but all over. In the name of Big Drama, it ignores the chilling effect of political correctness, which compels everyone who's not a fringe-dwelling hatemonger or a person pushed to the edge of his or her rope to express racist thoughts in code.

ooh, and this is a good one as well. i just can't stop:

Haggis doesn't care about such distinctions because deep down he doesn't actually want to say something useful about the modern state of race relations. He just wants to be able to play with racially charged material and be acclaimed for his bravery.