Hollywood awards local film best picture

By Bernie Woodall

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The Oscars gave its top prize on
Sunday to a movie set in its own backyard, Los Angeles, a city
with a sunny exterior that in “Crash” is pierced to yield
darkness and mistrust based on race.

“Crash” examines 36 hours in the lives of about a dozen
L.A. dwellers of different ethnic and class backgrounds.

Oscar voters, most of whom live in and around Los Angeles
just like the characters of “Crash,” surprised oddsmakers by
picking the hometown film over “Brokeback Mountain,” which best
director winner Ang Lee set in Wyoming.

Larry McMurtry, who won the Oscar for best adapted
screenplay in writing “Brokeback Mountain” with Diana Ossana,
was asked backstage if “Crash” won because the Academy voted
for a favorite son.

“Yes, I do. Hometown movie,” said McMurtry.

“Crash” director Paul Haggis, who turns 53 this week, has
lived more than half his life in Los Angeles, where he moved
after graduating from college in his native Canada.

“Crash” gave moviegoers a view of what Los Angeles
residents may see from their cars.

If they crashed into each other, that is, according to the
script by Haggis and Bobby Moresco, which took the Oscar for
best original screenplay.

In Haggis’ Los Angeles, people carefully construct isolated
lives designed to keep distance from people.

“The movie is about our fear of strangers and the fact that
we isolate ourselves now in modern society because we’re more
and more in fear of strangers,” Haggis told “Talk of the
Nation,” a National Public Radio show.

“And it’s only when we actually collide with each other
that we actually feel anything,” he said.

It was a confrontation between Haggis and street thugs in
1991 that led to the writing of “Crash.”

Haggis has often told the story of how proud he was of his
new Porsche and how it was carjacked as he and his wife at the
time returned from the premiere of “Silence of the Lambs.”

Two young black men with guns stole his car. Realizing that
the thieves had his keys, he called for a locksmith to come to
his house after midnight.

He adapted both scenes from his real life for “Crash.”

“Ten years later, I woke up at two in the morning wondering
about those young men,” Haggis said in an interview last spring
when “Crash” opened.

Los Angeles has nearly 4 million residents and is one of
the most racially and ethnically mixed cities in America. It
has people from 140 different countries who speak 224 different
languages.

Whites account for less than half the population, with the
rest comprising large communities of Latinos, blacks and
Asian-Americans.

Haggis said his attempt to understand the men — from the
same city but a vastly different world than his own — who took
his car helped him focus his Oscar-winning writing.

“We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way
or that,” Haggis said. “I think that’s the real key in writing.
To look at a character without judgment.”

“Crash” was released by Lionsgate, a unit of Lions Gate
Entertainment Corp.