Why "Crash" Shouldn't Win the Oscar

Armand and I over at Bloodless have been having fun upbraiding Crash as pretty much the most overrated Best Picture odds-on favorite ever, but Matt Zoller Seitz just nails it beautifully. A tip of the hat to Armand.

I'm also going to pat myself on the back for posting the Afterschool Special observation here over a week before Zoller Steitz did, when I wrote:

My whole problem with the movie is that it doesn't show racism as being all that complex, unless complex equals nothing more than pervasiveness and brazenness. I'll grant that it doesn't play heavy favorites, but it also uses a bunch of extreme archetypes to supposedly hem at the more subtle, insidious stuff that really plagues us. The racists you can see aren't nearly as problematic as the ones you can't. Everyone's racism in Crash was on such display that they might have been drug using jocks in an afterschool special, and though the movie had its moments overall it felt like nothing so much as an afterschool special for adults: hectoring, pedantic, and predictable.

Zoller Steitz says it way better, in any event.