NYPress) Party Line: Messagemaking Swallows Moviemaking at the Oscars

In the future, we may look back on 2006 as the year the Oscars officially went from irritating to depressing. The year the crudely manipulative and politically anachronistic racial melodrama Crash won Best Picture is also the year American commercial cinema settled into its nursing home bed, stuck the morphine drip in its arm and began the long, slow journey toward the sweet hereafter.

Over the past couple of decades, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had a hit-and-miss record with Best Picture winners, usually preferring to avoid giving the top prize to thematically or artistically daring movies. We’ve seen the prize go to handsome, safe movies (Out of Africa) or slick, safe movies (American Beauty) or earnest, safe movies (Driving Miss Daisy).

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If Crash is what passes for a great and important movie right now, and if we have indeed gotten to the point where a movie’s award-worthiness is primarily dependent upon the inarguable correctness of its message, and if America truly needs the schematic, circa-1970s tolerance lesson of Crash, then both the country and its movie industry are in even worse shape than we realized.

A friend of mine described Crash as a movie that believes in machina ex deus, a deliberate mangling of Latin that gets perilously close to the truth we saw expressed Sunday night: The machine is the god.

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