Simply awful

Rating: 1/10 (8 March 2006)

The idea that CRASH got awarded BEST PICTURE at the Oscars makes me physically sick. A clear case of the Los-Angeles-based members of the academy assuaging their racist guilt by voting for a film that purported to deal seriously with race issues (although it was a tawdry, half baked turkey directed by a patronizing honky in metaphoric black-face) in the year that America's race divide has been horribly exposed by the grim events in New Orleans.
It's a crime that the real moral and aesthetic hire-wire act of ''Brokeback Mountain' had to suffer the ignominy of being bested by that far inferior, far shallower film and its self-indulgent crocodile tears.
Paul Haggis is an insulated millionaire TV writer and a fraud, pasting third-hand ideas together with cliché and coincidence and baking the inedible treacly pie in an emetic marinade of overblown music and sentimentality.
Shame on him. Shame on the Academy.