AND THE OSCAR GOES TO ...
Hollywood stars come out to shine
In a bizarre last-minute envelope flub, Warren Beatty announced the odds-on favourite, La La Land, as best picture at Sunday’s 89th Academy Awards. But midway through the speeches it was revealed that Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight was in fact the winner, taking its tally to three.
La La Land, which went into the night with a record-tying 14 nominations, did manage to come out of the evening with six wins, including best actress for Emma Stone and best director for Damien Chazelle.
A tale of love and jazz, set amid a fantasy version of Los Angeles, and starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, La La Land had the same number of nominations as Titanic in 1997 and 1950’s All About Eve; both of those went on to win best picture. La La Land also won for original score, original song (for City of Stars, sung by Gosling in the film), cinematography, and production design. But in the early going it was anything but a La La Land route. Canadian sound engineer Sylvain Bellemare took the award for sound editing for his work on Denis Villeneuve’s science-fiction picture Arrival, which went into the night tied with Moonlight with eight nominations including best picture.
Moonlight and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea each took home another pair of prizes. Moonlight won for best adapted screenplay, and for Mahershala Ali as best supporting actor. Manchester won for best original screenplay and for Casey Affleck’s lead role in the film.
Rounding out the acting categories, Viola Davis took the best supporting actress prize for Fences, delivering a tearful thank-you to the late screenwriter August Wilson and others. But for the most part the speeches avoided the kind of pointed barbs heard at the recent Screen Actors Guilds awards, and from Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes, when she took aim at President Donald Trump, calling him a bully and received a Twitter-lashing in response.
One exception on Sunday night was Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian director of The Salesman, which won the best foreign-language Oscar. Farhadi, who also won the prize for his 2011 film A Separation, boycotted the ceremony after Trump’s travel ban.
“I’m sorry I’m not with you tonight,” he said in a statement. “My absence is out of respect for the people of my country and six other nations.” Referring to the travel ban “inhumane,” he called on filmmakers to “create empathy between us and others, an empathy we need today more than ever.”
Gael Garcia Bernal, presenting the prizes for animation, also noted that actors are often migrant workers, and that, “as a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker [and] as a human being, I’m against any kind of wall that wants to separate us.”
Zootopia won in the best animated feature category, while the Pixar short Piper, from Ontario animator Alan Barillaro won for best animated short. It was the first win in that category for Pixar since For the Birds in 2000.
Other Oscars included Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge for sound mixing and film editing; Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them for costume design; Suicide Squad for makeup and hairstyling; The Jungle Book for visual effects; and the seven-plus-hour miniseries O.J.: Made in America for best documentary, which became the longest film to win in any category in the history of the awards.