At first glance, the odds seemed stacked against Crash's Best Picture chances. It was up against Spielberg (Munich), Clooney (Good Night, and Good Luck), a biopic (Capote), and the year's most controversial film (Brokeback Mountain). But in the end, Crash's liberal-humanist take on race proved more attractive to Oscar voters than Brokeback's unflinching look at homophobia, and so it took home the night's top prize. That decision has long been regarded by critics as one of the Academy's worst; while Brokeback's reputation has only grown, Crash still earns criticism for its oversimplification of racism and misrepresentation of America's racial history. As Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote, Crash is "propaganda ... the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism." Paul Haggis, the film's director, hears those complaints and, surprisingly, agrees with some of them. In an interview with HitFix, Haggis admits Crash wouldn't have been his pick for Best Picture either:Was...