On the morning after the Academy Awards, I awoke with a question on my mind: "What do movies do best?" Do they help us understand the challenges others face? Do they teach us about other cultures and diverse backgrounds, or do they just make us feel good? While all of those answers are true, consider this: movies allow us to work out our own emotional issues through the actions of the characters on screen.

When CRASH won the Academy Award for Best Picture recently, I was thrilled. Why? Because the movie did what it was supposed to do. It made a whole lot of people "uncomfortable." For some, it evoked memories of their own discrimination experiences; for others, it calls to mind their own biased behavior or that of someone close to them. But is that enough?

Of course it's not enough. Now, it's up to you and to me and to anyone, left with emotional questions to answer after seeing the film, to take action and expand their understanding. What do we do with unconscious fears and unspoken prejudices the movie uncovered? If we don't find them, understand them and deal with them, we end up repeating behavior that creates cross-cultural misunderstandings (see more on cross-cultural communication at www.DrJoAnnPina.com ).

Fear-based behavior comes out when we least suspect it as we experience racism, ageism, wealth-ism, homophob-ism or any number of "isms" and can't believe it's happening to us, inside of us, around us, or worst case that it's actually perpetrated by us---even today.

Kenneth Turan, film critic for the LA Times, suggests that CRASH is a "feel-good movie about racism