Less Cash, More Crash

By RICHARD CORLISS

For Oscar this year, cheap is chic. Four of the five films nominated for Best Picture cost under $15 million to make, less than a fifth of the average Hollywood budget. Of them, the very cheapest was Crash, which cost $6.5 million and earned six Oscar nods, including three for writer-director-producer Paul Haggis. Yet the film's domestic box-office total ($56 million) was higher than that of any of its laureled rivals when the nominations came out last Tuesday.

When the execs at Lionsgate Films told Haggis several months ago that they were aiming for Best Picture, he literally laughed at them. As Haggis recalls, "I told them, 'Please, don't embarrass me by even saying things like that.'"

He should have trusted the Lionsgaters. Handed the tough sell of a multistory drama about racial tension, they made bold decisions: to open the film in May and play it on 1,900 screens, get the cast on Oprah, then saturate the film community with 130,000 DVDs. "Nothing sells itself," says co-star and co-producer Don Cheadle, who was pleased when Crash became the right kind of controversial film--"the quintessential watercooler movie."

But Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain is still the favorite for the top awards. At least Haggis thinks so: "We all know that George [Clooney] and Bennett [Miller] and I and Steven [Spielberg] are going to be in the audience applauding Ang. But one always hopes we'll be up there for something." Maybe. So don't count Crash out. The little movie that could may have one last surprise in store.

With reporting by Reported by Jeffrey Ressner, Sonja Steptoe