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March 15, 2006
Yari: 'It's Really About Correcting the System'
Also in town for last night's Find Me Guilty premiere was the film's producer Bob Yari, who has been in the news recently for producing a mildly successful indie flick called Crash. Except he was not the producer. Or maybe he was half a producer. Either way, more than two weeks after his failed appeal to the Producers Guild and 10 days after nominal producers Cathy Schulman and Paul Haggis claimed Crash's Best Picture Oscar, Yari is still stating his case.
"Very regrettably, we're in litigation," he told The Reeler. "But the litigation is not litgation to punish anyone or to extract money from anyone. It's really about correcting the system. It's about correcting a system that I think is a blemish on the Academy. Once that's fixed, I think the Academy can hold its head up high and do whatever it wants--as long as the process is open and fair, of course, and gives people a voice and a right to both respond to any allegations that may be (made) against them that they're not being told about, and there's the opportunity to for them to be properly scrutinized."
Whether or not Yari has the juice to get the Guild's arbitration rules revised remains to be seen (Sharon Waxman scraped together a nice overview of the Crash crisis last week in The Times), but I also wanted to get Yari's impressions on the backlash against the film's Oscar triumph. No fan of the film myself, it never occurred to me that its victory could provoke so many otherwise classy folks like Annie Proulx to such sustained, vitriolic revolt.
"I think a lot of people, when they don't get the film that they're passionate about winning, it comes out as an angry response," Yari said. "The odd thing is that attacking Crash is not the answer. It's sometimes just accepting the fact that maybe Academy members--as much as they liked Brokeback Mountain--liked Crash a little better in the majority. That's not a bad thing. Keep in mind that Academy members voted for two films of the same nature--Capote and Brokeback. If there was any hesitation to vote for a film like that, then they wouldn't have nominated those two pictures. Sometimes one picture is more liked by one group of people versus another. At the BAFTA awards, Brokeback won and Crash lost. So, you know, it's very hard to just say, 'I believe a film is better, and therefore everyone should agree with me.'"
And if Crash's banal self-loathing is indeed Hollywood's gold standard, then Capote probably came closer to a win than anybody outside Price Waterhouse Coopers will ever know. Who would have thought the gays could get a worse break than Yari? Oscar '06--the shocks never end.
(Photo: John Sciulli / WireImage)
Posted by stvanairsdale at March 15, 2006 11:23 AM
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