play (actually movie) o the year

I have one thing to say about the Oscars, and it is this:

KIM:  Women's ice hockey.

JEREMY:  You're kidding.

KIM:  The U.S. women's team won the first Olympic gold medal in ice hockey and there were over four thousand fans in the arena to see them do it.

JEREMY:  They beat a team of Slovakian cocktail waitresses, and there were over four thousand people at my cousin Jacob's bar mitzvah.

ELLIOT (to JEREMY):  What do you got?

JEREMY:  Mark McGwire hits 70.

KIM:  It's a little obvious.

JEREMY:  Our goal isn't to be cunning, is it?

NATALIE:  Can we keep this organized?  Pros and cons.

JEREMY:  Well, the pro is that he broke an unbreakable record, and the con is Kim likes women's ice hockey.

NATALIE:  What's next?

JEREMY:  Jeff Gordon.

KIM:  No.

JEREMY:  Why?

KIM:  'Cause it's NASCAR and who gives a damn.

JEREMY:  Who gives a damn?

KIM:  How many people give a good damn?

JEREMY:  Well, it's the most popular sport in the world, so probably more than four thousand.

NATALIE:  Next.

JEREMY:  All right.  Austrian skier Herman Meier.

NATALIE:  Pros.

JEREMY:  He got up from one of the most horrific accidents in Olympic history and won the gold medal two days later.

NATALIE:  Cons.

KIM:  It's downhill skiing.

JEREMY:  And?

KIM:  Who gives a damn.

...

JEREMY:  The Yankees win the World Series.

DANA:  That came as a big shock after they won a hundred and fourteen games.

JEREMY:  What is it with this element of surprise you people are looking for?

Sports Night, "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee", by Aaron Sorkin

I've seen two main categories of objection to Crash winning (actually, usually to Crash beating Brokeback Mountain for, but that's a separate issue) the Oscar for Best Picture:

1.  It was badly written and clumsily directed.  [shrug]  I happen to disagree, and the critical opinions I've read have been just about evenly split.  At least that's a legitimate complaint, though, unlike
2.  Please, like it's news that there are race-relation problems in LA?

Um ... no, and I don't think Crash ever claimed to be telling a story nobody'd ever heard before, and I don't think that's the standard most people apply anyhow.  It's not Most Innovative Picture, after all, or Picture that Tells the Most Unexpected Story.  That might be more of a criterion for the Best Documentary categories, although one would hope that there'd be other criteria as well, like photography and editing and things.

The first movie I can remember seeing in a theater was E.T..  Since that time, there have been 24 Best Picture winners:

Ghandi
Terms of Endearment*
Amadeus*
Out of Africa*
Platoon
The Last Emperor*
Rain Man
Driving Miss Daisy*
Dances With Wolves*
The Silence of the Lambs*
Unforgiven
Schindler's List*
Forrest Gump*
Braveheart
The English Patient*
Titanic
Shakespeare in Love
American Beauty
Gladiator
A Beautiful Mind*
Chicago*
The Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King*
Million Dollar Baby*
Crash

The fourteen films marked by asterisks were made from screenplays adapted from other works -- over the years, these have been called Based on Material from Another Medium, Based on Material Previously Produced or Published, or just plain Adapted.  (Random side note:  Titanic is the only winning picture in the past 24 years whose screenplay wasn't even nominated.)  Point is, they all by definition told stories we'd heard before.  (They might have been original at the time they were first told, or they might not.  At least five -- or seven, if you count Platoon and The English Patient -- of the asterisked movies and three -- or five, if you count Rain Man and Shakespeare in Love -- of the unasterisked ones are about real people and/or relatively well-known historical events.)  And Titanic?  Please!  We all knew the boat sank -- that wasn't the strength on which that movie was chosen.  (Truth be known, it's hard for me to say exactly what was the strength on which that movie was chosen -- particularly since two years earlier Braveheart had beaten another disaster-movie-where-everyone-knew-how-it-ended, namely Apollo 13, which was vastly superior to both Braveheart and Titanic.  But see above, complaint #1.)  In short, there've been precious few Oscar-winning films in my memory that have told new stories.  Why?  Because there aren't any new stories.  What they do, the Best Picture winners, or what they should do, is tell their stories well; Ebert says "a movie is not good or bad because of its content, but because of how it handles its content."

So, again, whether or not it handled its theme well is a reasonable discussion to have when talking about whether it deserved to win the Oscar or not.  But insisting it didn't deserve the award (or the nomination, even) because of what the content was is as silly as suggesting that Brokeback Mountain's nomination (or defeat) was because of the content.  The industry agreed that both films told good or important (but not necessarily newsworthy) stories well and were well-made.  That's all there is.  (The fact that the industry has agreed over the years that Moulin Rouge!, Chocolat, Shakespeare in Love, The Full Monty, Titanic, Jerry Maguire -- Jerry Maguire! -- Four Weddings and a Funeral, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Ghost, The Godfather Part III, and Dead Poets Society, many of which I love very much, might have deserved and in some cases did deserve the Best Picture award is a sign that they do in fact get it wrong sometimes.  I've never said they don't.  But like I said, #1 is a reasonable complaint.  #2, I just find silly.)