In a surprise win, the Best Picture award went to Moonlight, made by Barry Jenkins and based on the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by Tarell Alvin McCraney. After all, Damien Chazelle’s musical La La Land had been clearly favored to win and nominated in 14 categories at once. The expectations were so high that an assistant mixed up the envelopes and La La Land was originally declared the best picture. The error was fixed and apologized for on the stage. Moonlight also won statuettes for the Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali) and for the Best Adapted Screenplay (McCraney and Jenkins). La La Land, after all, still ended up a winner, netting six Oscars, including awards for the Best Director, Best Cinematography (Linus Sandgren), Best Original Score and Best Original Song (both to Justin Hurwitz), and the Best Actress (Emma Stone). At 32, Damien Chazelle has become the youngest director ever to win an Academy Award.
The story of unfulfilled expectations repeated itself in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The black comedy Toni Erdmann (directed by Maren Ade (Germany) and winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the last Cannes Film Festival) was projected to win, but the award went to the Iranian-French drama Salesman (Asghar Farhadi) instead.
It seems that this year’s ceremony was one of the most politicized in the history of the awards. For example, the evening’s host, American comedian Jimmy Kimmel, took a jab at US President Donald Trump: “I mean, remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist? That is gone thanks to him.” However, the scandal sparked by the total absence of African American directors and actors happened before the presidential campaign. The Academy cleared its act this year: four movies with non-white protagonists competed in the main category, and the category Best Supporting Actress had three African American women nominated for the first time in history (Viola Davis, who starred in Fences, won it).
Another political gesture was made by Farhadi, who did not come to the ceremony for reasons of principle, because he opposed the anti-immigration “Trump order” that restricts the entry to the US for people from Muslim countries, in particular Iran. Farhadi and his team refused to travel to Los Angeles even if they were granted an exception.
Moonlight is a Bildungsroman in three parts dealing with a black lad’s growing up experience: his childhood, adolescence, and adult years. Aware of being gay and saddled with a drug addict mother, he lives in criminalized and aggressively homophobic environment in Miami. Still, he tries not only to survive, but also to find love. This painful story is convincingly directed and played, but comes short in the last part due to it being too melodramatic (although in fairness it must be said that La La Land is quite melodramatic as well).
The easiest way would be to ascribe the victory of Moonlight to political correctness. Of course, with such highly influential awards, public expectations are at least as important as purely artistic qualities; still, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences aims to support new trends. In this regard, Moonlight is an unquestioned winner. La La Land is a truly masterful work, but it is also an homage to the history of the musical as a genre, featuring many allusions and sometimes even direct quotations from earlier musical films, ranging from such classics as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You. However, Moonlight is without a precedent in mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, at least thematically. No one had tried to tell the story of becoming a gay in the brutal landscape of an African-American ghetto before, and moreover, to tell it in the most delicate and lyrical manner. Therefore, it is quite a logical choice for the award.
And, of course, its impact in today’s America will be felt far beyond the film industry.
