While doom-scrolling, I saw someone ask the question about the worst Best Picture Oscar winner.
Immediately, my mind went towards Crash. It won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2006.
The film is a mood—one of tension, suspicion, guilt.
It paints a picture of America where race is a live wire under every interaction. Where everyone, regardless of background, is either a victim of prejudice or a carrier of it. Often both.
Is the movie true? Hmmm, yes and no. Or it depends.
Every vignette in Crash—from the cop who violates a Black woman in front of her husband, to the Persian shopkeeper blamed for vandalism—is something that has happened, somewhere, to someone. But truth isn’t the same as representation. And accuracy is not the same as proportion.
So what happens to your mind after watching it?
If you showed that movie to 1,000 people and then asked them about race in America, would they give you answers closer to the truth, or further from it?
In 2021, Americans were asked how many unarmed Black men were killed by police that year. The correct number was 11. Half of liberals guessed over 1,000. The median response across political lines was at least ten times the actual figure.
Imagine someone looking at your bank account, seeing $10,000, and insisting you’re a millionaire. You’d laugh, then worry about their sanity. But when that same overestimation is about race, crime, or injustice, we rarely pause to ask why.
It’s easy to blame the media, and it’s not wrong. But that’s only part of the story. Most people are not statistically literate. Most of us think with stories, not data.
So when a woman shares her experience of sexual harassment, some men discount it. They don’t know men like that. They assume most men are like them—decent.
Meanwhile, some women assume most men are like that. Their own experience, plus those of friends, paint a pattern. Both are making the same mistake. They’re treating extremes as norms.
And here’s the most brutal truth: it’s possible—statistically inevitable—that most men are decent and most women have experienced harassment. Because most violent and abusive behavior comes from a tiny sliver of the population.
According to the FBI in 2019, roughly 0.37% of the population was involved in reported violent crimes, or approximately 1.2 million people.
It’s not that crime isn’t real. Or racism. Or misogyny. It’s that their distribution is lopsided. A small number of people cause a large amount of harm. A fact that doesn’t always feel satisfying. Or cinematic.
But art doesn’t aim for accuracy. It aims for impact. It bypasses reason and lands in the gut. That’s its power—and its risk. A beautiful movie can distort just as easily as it can illuminate. It can mislead us not by what it shows, but by how completely it fills the frame.
Because beauty feels like truth. And that’s the problem.
A beautiful lie is still a lie, even if it wins an Oscar.