last year's oscars

Many guys wait all year for the Superbowl, the playoffs, the World Series, Wimbledon, the Stanley Cup, the Indy 500; I wait all year for the Oscars. The Academy Awards are my Superbowl. I have watched them every year since I was about ten years old. Like most Superbowl fans, I don’t watch the Oscars because I have an inordinate respect for the participants or the voters or the presenters. Instead, like Superbowl fans who love football but not necessarily football players, I love movies but not necessarily movie makers, actors, etc. I like the tributes, the movie clips, and the inside jokes (which is why I also love DVD’s; watching an excellent movie, then learning more about the filmmakers’ motivations and the movie-making process is like a movie geek’s dream!), but I’m often annoyed by the celebrities and their causes and their misplaced sympathies.

This year, unlike years when I have a clear favorite I am rooting for, like Return of the King, I found myself rooting against a movie. I was cheering for “Anything but Brokeback Mountain”. Even though I had not yet seen either movie, I was really happy that Crash won Best Picture just because it wasn’t Brokeback Mountain. It isn’t like me to shun a movie based strictly on its subject matter, but I just can’t get behind a movie about gay cowboys. Sue me.

I had heard good things about Crash, and now it had won Best Picture, so I ran out and rented it and I am so glad I did. Crash is a complex movie – the language is rough and there are some scenes that are difficult to watch – but it is an important movie. Take this passage, spoken by Graham (played by Don Cheadle), at the beginning of the film, “It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”

On the surface, Crash looks like a story about prejudice and hatred, but it is actually a modern-day retelling of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. It takes place in a fictional Los Angeles where everyone is the beaten man in the ditch and everyone is the priest or Levite, but maybe everyone could also be the Samaritan. People are walled off and emotionally distant. The characters are products of our 21st-century American culture. All of their connections are either inappropriate or impersonal or illegal; their relationships are all defined by prejudice and distrust until they find themselves in a ditch themselves and have to reach out to the untouchable Samaritan man for help, only to find out that they are just as untouchable to someone else. There is fear and there is pain but there is also hope.

This is what being human is all about. It is what Christ showed us when he risked His reputation to eat with prostitutes and tax collectors. It’s what He modeled when He shared His life and ministry with His circle of twelve comrades. We must share ourselves. We must risk our safe lives behind all this “metal and glass” and touch. Otherwise we will be fated to crash into each other just to feel something.

What are you doing to reach out? What are you doing to overcome your prejudices? Could you reach out to the prostitute or the tax collector? How about the gay cowboy? Maybe I will see Brokeback Mountain after all.