How Did Moonlight Win Best Picture?

Big Magilla
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Re: How Did Moonlight Win Best Picture?

Post by Big Magilla »

The case against La La Land:
1) Too frivolous for a Best Picture win, although it remained the favorite.
2) A growing number of voters like to upset the apple cart for the sake of upsetting it.

The case for Moonlight:
1) The first win for a film told completely from a black point of view
2) The first win for a film in which the main character is gay and a middle finger to the 2005 upset of Crash over Brokeback Mountain
3) A middle finger to the anti-diversity of the Trump administration
Mister Tee
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How Did Moonlight Win Best Picture?

Post by Mister Tee »

I know: this is a question that should have been raised/dealt with a month ago. But 1) I got sick shortly after the Oscars and didn’t have the energy to delve into this and 2) a friend who was in the hospital during the Oscars belatedly contacted me and asked if I could explain it to him. So, since I was going through the exercise for him, I thought I’d post here, as well.

We did certainly note, right on Oscar night, that, over and above the monumental envelope screw-up, the Moonlight win was an upset of extremely rare vintage. Sabin wondered that very night if it was the biggest best picture upset of our lifetimes. I said that I thought the Fosse win over Coppola in ’72 was more astonishing, but that to a degree reflected my old-timer’s view that film and director are intrinsically connected prizes (a supposition that may no longer apply). In terms of simply the best film category: there have been other upsets, but very few times when a name was read out that simply hadn’t seemed possible going into the evening. Which is to say, Crash’s win may have been horrifying, but it’s not as if no one had suggested it might win; Shakespeare in Love and Driving Miss Daisy had similarly been seen as possible upsets, though not favorites; and Spotlight last year – along with The Big Short – was viewed by many as just as likely to triumph as The Revenant.

To find an equivalent surprise to Moonlight’s win, I think you have to go back at least to Braveheart in 1995 – Apollo 13, like La La Land, had swept the three Guilds, and seemed the heavy-front-runner. But even that situation was muddled by Apollo 13’s missing the directing nomination -- a major vulnerability then, Driving Miss Daisy notwithstanding. La La Land had no such handicap/excuse – in fact, its 14 nods made it seem utterly invulnerable. (The film retroactively takes Mary Poppins/Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? off the hook as film with most nominations to not win best picture.) Maybe the strongest comparison for Moonlight’s victory would be Oliver! in 1968 – it was the first film ever to win best director without the DGA, and the only one to date to follow up that directing upset with a best picture win. (I of course exclude from this discussion the ‘85/’95/’12 years, where the DGA winner wasn’t Academy-nominated.)

And there was good reason for Moonlight to be seen as such an unlikely winner, over and above its lack of showing at the Guilds: in years where there are film/director splits, the artier/more challenging effort has tended to win the directing trophy, not best picture. Best picture – today in the ranked voting system, but even before -- has usually gone to a more conventional, “likable film”: Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago, Spotlight. Which sounds a whole lot more like La La Land than Moonlight. The question before us is, how did the elliptical black gay movie become the winner on a consensus ballot?

I have two thoughts: First, Moonlight’s form was a bit unusual, but, as Uri pointed out at the time, its content was not. The childhood sequences – roughly 2/3rds of the film – had clear echoes of Dickens, right down to a more benign Fagin figure. It’s not hard for an American audience to empathize with a sensitive child not given enough attention by his mother and terrorized by school bullies. Yes, the fact that this particular kid was gay could have alienated some part of the Academy electorate (the Brokeback deniers). But the only genuinely sexual moment –- the scene on the beach -- was far less explicit than a routine heterosexual scene (most action here was kept out of frame) and the scene as a whole felt more affection- than carnal-based.

My second thought: Moonlight had the closest to a happy ending of any of this year’s true contenders. Think about it: Arrival had Amy Adams’ child’s fate. Manchester by the Sea, besides dealing with death throughout, had the imperfect ending of Affleck being unable to come through for Hedges. Even La La Land ended with its lovers separated – bittersweet, not a downer, thanks to the fantasy montage. But can that be compared to Moonlight’s climax, where the two guys we’ve been following the entire film have managed to push past the challenges and betrayals of their upbringing, to find one another at last in what seems serenity and harmony? Here too, the love part of the relationship is emphasized, with physical attraction barely making an appearance. It might be that this film, however many ways it strikes audiences as daring/ambitious, was, in the end, the most reassuring/feel-good of the options available, and that’s why it triumphed so unexpectedly.

Or do people have different ideas?
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