The Oscars have a duty to surprise. But Crash? Best Film? How the hell did that happen? Brokeback Mountain was long the pink-hot favourite. Ang Lee won Best Director. The top film honour seemed a simple nab. But Paul Haggis’s loose bag of LA stories, most central of which is a racist cop who sexually abu- ses a traffic accident victim (Thandie Newton), crushed the competition. Why? The script is clever, and the editing sublime. But more importantly, it touches issues close to home. The racial theme is worthy of Newsnight. The film fondles an entire country’s most insular fears.

In short, Crash won the Academy’s most precious award partly because it is a local hero — so many of the Academy's voters are LA-based, after all — but also because after so many years of Hollywood playing at being the Dream Factory, it is choosing to deal with real issues, real people. The remarkable feature about the awards this year is the height of the nominees’ brow. There are no popcorn sellers, and no clean sweeps.

Most of the films have almost too much to say. Brokeback Mountain taps sexual hypocrisy and blue-collar lies. Reese Witherspoon (Best Actress for Walk the Line) takes a musical legend to task. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s exquisite performance as Capote won Best Actor for an icon who is exposed as a bastard. Rachel Weisz plucked the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing an activist in The Constant Gardener (banishing somewhat the shame of this terrific film not winning any of the major Baftas). And George Clooney won the male equivalent for the political thriller Syriana.

None of these films will ever mint commercial gold. But I’m inspired rather than alarmed. Film audiences are clearly growing up. Even Nick Park, who scooped the Animation Oscar for Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, admitted that he would rather his films pitched for the big prizes (Best Film) than win an endless crop of ghetto awards.

The cutting edge of film is becoming increasingly public, and stars are starting to pick and choose subjects as carefully as directors. It’s simply not enough to face up a multimillion-dollar franchise. If you want the serious prizes and respect you have to sacrifice the perks, or do projects under your own steam.

Clooney is the most fascinating example this year. He’s gambled all his chips on films that are fiendishly political, and he’s managed to drag fans and Academy voters into the cinema. Despite his success with Syriana and his increasingly statesman-like demeanour, I feel desperately sorry that he failed to pick up an award for Good Night, and Good Luck – a gripping account of media solidarity during Senator Joseph McCarthy ’s Communist witchhunts.

The interesting detail is how his film commitments have exactly mirrored a wider change of taste. Clooney has no qualms about tackling the status quo, and no fear about the size of his opponent. However, the big test of Oscar’s creeping appetite for issues will come at the box office: how big will the audiences be?

What also worries me is how long anyone can sustain a political or artistic agenda amid all the fuss and glamour. People — thinkers, I should say — like Clooney are rare. These strange films need events such as the Oscars. But they are flirting with shrinking audiences.The television figures are falling by millions, year on year. There is little patience for three-hour ceremonies. After numbing hours of reality TV, viewers think they have a right to vote. They can ’t understand why they can’t vote for the Best Actor by simply pushing a button.

From James Christopher's review of Crash, August 11, 2005

Sod’s law and a gut hatred of strangers is the tragi-comic glue of Crash. The way the film slashes and swivels through the human murk is marvellous. A series of car crashes provides the link between stories that shuffle from penthouse to pavement. The daisy chain of stars on the sharp end of cruel luck and knee-jerk racism is a glamorous joy. Sandra Bullock is a friendless, neurotic trophy wife. Don Cheadle is terrific as a haunted, compromised FBI agent. Brendan Fraser has never tapped his privileges as an ambitious politician to such cynical effect. And Matt Dillon is a chilly beast as a cop who earths his frustration by humiliating hapless coloured innocents.

I’ve never seen a film so eloquent about blind prejudice and the easy slope to bitterness. Haggis captures the shallow glassy politeness of strangers, and the bottled anger within. He sets up tense, intimate scenes between couples in which moods spin on a single word. It’s a brave film that addresses the unspoken racial nausea that lingers after 9/11 in a way that no other film has dared. The flaw is the commercial desire to strike a perfect balance, and end with a life-affirming slap on the rump.

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