Find out who won which awards and what they said.
After bizarre Oscar oops over best picture, ‘La La Land’ still picks up six awards
The 89th Academy Awards was fairly uninteresting until its final moments when the wrong winner was announced. The provocative film “Moonlight” — a beautiful and complex independent film with a miniscule budget — won best picture, but only after presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner.
For a few moments, “La La Land” danced away with the evening’s biggest prize. The film had won six awards and appeared to win a seventh, confirmed by Dunaway.
Only he was given the wrong winner card.
In a confusing and startling reversal of fortune, the correct card surfaced. The “La La Land” cast and crew left the stage. And those involved with creating “Moonlight” took the stage and the top prize.
“It’s just an awards show,” host Jimmy Kimmel quipped, finding some humor in the bizarre series of events.
“Moonlight” also won best actor for Mahershala Ali and best adapted screenplay for Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McRaney.
So where did that leave the rest of the evening? “La La Land” earned best director for Damien Chazelle and best actress for Emma Stone among its awards. The evening’s heavy favorite — which tied a record for most nominations with 14 — fell well short of the most wins, a record shared by “Titanic,” “Ben-Hur” and “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” with 11, though Chazelle became, at age 32, the youngest ever best director winner.
Early in the evening, the film looked as though it might stumble, but around the telecast’s grueling halfway point, “La La Land” started to collect awards: best cinematography for Linus Sandgren and best original score by Justin Hurwitz and best original song for “City of Stars,” which Hurwitz co-wrote.
Awards were distributed all over the place: Of the nine best picture nominees, seven of them won Oscars. Admittedly that’s something of a devalued boast after the DC Comics adapted “Suicide Squad” — a savagely reviewed movie of minimal merit — can now call itself an Academy Awardwinning film, even if it was for makeup and hairstyling.
“Manchester by the Sea” won two awards, Casey Affleck for best actor and Kenneth Lonergan for original screenplay.
Ali was the evening’s first winner for “Moonlight,” and he set a subtle tone for the evening, thanking his teachers and professors and minimizing his part in bringing films to life. “You’re in service to these stories and these characters,” he said, before thanking his wife, who four days earlier gave birth.
Viola Davis won best supporting actress for her role in “Fences.” Her acceptance speech was more grandiose: “We are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life,” she said before thanking “Fences” playwright August Wilson, “who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people.”
Hers was a passionate and undoubtedly sincere speech, albeit one that would set cynical eyes rolling.
Here’s the thing. The success of “La La Land” — six Oscars, $141 million at the box office, nearly five times its budget — obscures the fact that the film’s titular phrase has for years been a pejorative reference to Los Angeles.
“La la land” is traditionally spit with some degree of venom used by those who see the West Coast hub for Hollywood as oblivious to the real world. And the annual Academy Awards, well, it’s la-la at its most out-lala-ndish. And the first Oscar telecast since the election of a guy Hollywood types find objectionable was fraught with the potential for being insufferable.
Instead, this year’s Oscars show was charming at the outset, opening with a music number instead of pre-taped sketch comedy followed by rapid fire jokes. Justin Timberlake danced down the aisles to the stage singing the nominated “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from “Trolls.” The open was refreshing simply for considering the expected and choosing a different direction.
Jimmy Kimmel was an amiable host, and he had a little fun at President Trump’s expense, but nothing that steered toward screed, noting the show would be aired in “225 countries that now hate us.” Then he served up a plea for viewers to reach out to someone they disagreed with before having fun at the expense of Mel Gibson (“you look great, I think the Scientology is working”), Meryl Streep (“she has phoned it in for more than 50 films over the course of her lackluster career”) and, obviously, Kimmel’s familiar foil Matt Damon (“when I first met Matt, I was the fat one”).
He did thank Trump: “Remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist? That’s gone.”
And for just the third time in nearly 90 years, two African-American actors — Ali and Davis — took away Oscars for acting, notable in particular because in 2015 and 2016 no black actors received nominations.
Politics and issues gradually worked their way in, most notably with the best foreign film win for “The Salesman.” Iranian director Asghar Farhadi sent a statement as he refused to show — as a support of solidarity with his nation and six others that are part of Trump’s travel-ban-in-progress.
Elsewhere in the program, “O.J.: Made in America” — which most viewers consumed on TV — won best documentary. And strange as it sounds, “Zootopia” was a topical winner as best animated feature film. For those who haven’t seen it, the film is richly allegorical about any place built on cultural variety, with prejudices and expectations that come with it.
A late Mean Tweets segment put together by Kimmel was among the few engaging moments in the show’s second half, though largely it felt like a slog with gleaming gowns, long speeches and circuits of appreciation between famous people and other famous people. A segment in which stars discussed their inspirations was introduced 90 minutes in. The show hit near standstill when some tourists were brought in to touch a few Oscars, though to its credit it fit an us-and-them la-la-land theme that kept wafting through the evening.
Until that ending. That strange slapstick Hollywood ending where something so tightly scripted — that couldn’t possibly come undone — came undone. On one hand, it was full of movie magic.
And at the same time the mistake also loosened up the telecast. Human error, it turns out, can humanize even those who seem far removed from reality.