The (forgettable) film Crash with Sandra Bullock won Best Picture in the mid-2000s... but it's mostly (for the first half or so) a sanitized, watered down, far less daring or interesting version of Magnolia, which is an absolutely brilliant film.
If you’re tracing Crash back to Magnolia, keep on going until you reach Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993). Magnolia uses a similar template, just weighs it all down with more melodrama.
Magnolia was utterly forgettable to me, except for Tom Cruise's super sleazy, arrogant asshole character. Crash was even worse, though.
I recently watched Magnolia in the Prince Charles Cinema in London. I'd seen it multiple times before, but never in a cinema. The bit with the frogs was incredible, going from peaceful to absolutely deafening. That scene is now my most memorable.
There are so many movies I haven't had a chance to watch in a cinema, I wish more theaters would play classics on their largest screens. I just found out that one of our local cinemas now has weekly 'classic sneaks'. Lucky me.
I'm not going to tell you what movies you should like. Magnolia is a long film, and it takes a while to get where it is going. Some people think it's gimmick-y, others are willing to suspend belief and go with it. But either way, Julianne Moore wound tight, desperate William H Macy, lonely John C Reilly, Jason Robards on his deathbed... these are all epic performances (as is Tom Cruise of course). The secondary players as well -- Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Melora Walters, Jeremy Blackman (kid), Luis Guzman -- are superb. I acknowledge lots of people hate Magnolia but if you found it forgettable, I doubt you were even paying attention in the first place.