When watching an Academy-Award Best Picture winning film such as ‘Crash’, you expect to watch an extremely entertaining, nearly flawless story that you’ll look back on as one of the greatest films ever made. In truth, that is hardly ever the case. ‘Crash’, though a fascinating story, was no exception to this reality. At first glance, the film seems to be a genius narrative on racism and current social issues, but as the view processes and analyzes the events in the film, one finds that the story of the picture is really working against itself. Though it downgrades racism and suggests we all should take a second look at our own prejudices, the very blatant classism completely contradicts the film’s main goal. Characters such as Jean, Rick and Hansen, are pretty well off in their lives. Why? Because they are white and reflect no social irregularity throughout the entire movie. Meanwhile, Farhad, a man of Persian decent, feels he needs a gun to protect his family from the rest of the world; Cameron and Christine, a black couple, struggle to keep their relationship alive with the demands of their roles as man and woman; Anthony and Peter, two black men, are the only “street” characters predominantly featured in the film. So despite the films recognition of racism in all of society, it does not recognize or change the racism in itself.

   It’s clear to me why the film won the Best Original Screenplay category at the 2005 Academy Awards. Not only is the dialogue and subtext used to develop each character pitch-perfect, but the complicated structure is so well executed in the script that ‘Crash’ should be loved and studied by aspiring screenwriters for years to come.

However, like the movie as a whole, the script fails to recognize the racism in itself. While the “street” language heard through characters like Anthony and the foreign inadequacies are exhibited perfectly in Farhad’s dialogue, the language of the well-off white men and women of the film is often a bit too elegant for even the most casual movie goers.