Yet as much as Crash presented a flawed cross-section of LA society “crashing into each other”, as Don Cheadle’s weary cop Graham Waters utters in the opening minutes, many felt it too often prioritised its white characters’ perspectives. “[They] have interiority, and they’re dealing with all these brown characters who are just stereotypes,” says Demby, pointing in particular to Dillon’s bent cop character, who stops and molests Newton’s character Christine in front of her husband Cameron during a highway stop-and-search, only to rescue her from a car crash in a later scene. Newton herself told Vulture in 2020 that the storyline “neutralised the very real rage that African-American people feel”, and that she didn’t “buy into” the redemptive arc of Dillon’s character. Indeed, the treatment of Newton’s character is the element that has come in for most ire in the years since. “She’s in that movie to be acted upon; she’s the object, the mechanism for Matt Dillon’s redemption, and we [also] spend more time on Cameron’s [feelings of] emasculation [following her assault than her own],” says Demby.
Film journalist Stacey Wilson Hunt – host of podcast My Hollywood Story and author of a 2016 oral history of Crash’s Oscar win – appreciated the film’s unfiltered depiction of sexual assault – a moment which she says has become all the more potent in a post-#MeToo world. “As awful as that scene is, to me, it doesn’t feel unrealistic,” she says. But she too questions the way the film then ennobles the assaulter: “We’re in this culture that has been going on for millennia, where someone can say ‘Oh, I did these terrible things, but will you guys let me back into the prayer circle if I do this other nice thing?'”
In 2022, Haggis himself was found liable for raping film publicist Haleigh Breest in a civil trial and ordered to pay $10m damages. Haggis denied all the allegations and did not face any criminal charges. Breest said she was prompted to come forward after witnessing Haggis’ public condemnation of Harvey Weinstein.
How the win looks now
Reassessing the film from a 2026 perspective, Demby says it feels even more jarring to him now, because “of a reckoning around race and policing, [linked to] what’s happening with ICE”. “In Crash, you can see the seeds of this moment,” he says, but at the same time, he believes its storylines fail to offer meaningful commentary on the issue. “It doesn’t think of policing as [systemically flawed]. It doesn’t think of these things as calamities; it just makes them into [personal] dramas.”
So, would a film like Crash still win best picture today? While explicitly “issue”-based films continue to do well at the Oscars, ultimately Searles and Daniels think not. “[At the time] it seemed forward thinking, a way to get a bunch of actors from different backgrounds into one story,” says Searles. “So it was achieving a representation benchmark, but today, I don’t think it would win.”
