With Moonlight’s Oscar, the Academy got it right
It’s not often that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences validates my taste.
I picked Moonlight to win the Best Picture Oscar last week but didn’t really expect it to. I picked it because, of the nominated films, it was the one I liked best, the one I wanted to win. I didn’t think about any of the things that serious handicappers think about, like what other awards it might have won or what odds the U. K. bookies were quoting. Invested people can read the tea leaves and year after year predict winners at a 90- percent clip. Most of the folks we survey every year do just that — they’re right about who wins what far more than they’re wrong.
But all of them — save our copy desk chief Joe Riddle ( who also picked Moonlight) — picked La La Land to win the Best Picture Oscar.
There are a lot of reasons why Moonlight was unlikely to win. It is a relatively small, quiet movie with a predominantly black cast that isn’t about the peculiar institution of 19th- cen-
tury American slavery. It is about a conflicted young gay man. It is more about internal revelation than sweeping action.
It is the sort of movie that I suspect a lot of academy members hadn’t bothered to see. Its having received a nomination seemed a small miracle. Its winning is a major one. Understand, as I’ve said too often, I’m not terribly invested in any award shows. I get why people like to watch them and I understand that they matter in important ways that have mostly to do with the crucial business of moviemaking, but they don’t have anything to do with me. I just try to call ’ em as I see ’ em and to say something interesting and maybe true about the movies. If it were up to me, box offices figures would be relegated to the business pages.
But that said, I liked this year’s slate of Best Picture nominees — they represented the best of a certain kind of Hollywood movie. Three of them ( Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea and Hell or High Water) wound up on my end- of- the- year Top 10 list. Lion and Fences weren’t far behind.
That’s a pretty significant overlap. It’s no secret why film critics tend to like movies different from the general public, for film critics see far more movies. We have access to films that general audiences don’t, and we don’t generally pay cineplex prices to see movies.
I would be surprised if more than a dozen people in Arkansas have seen Toni Erdmann or My Life as a Zucchini. And they didn’t miss these Oscar- nominated films because they’re Philistines. They simply didn’t get the chance to see the movies — few people outside major cultural centers have. ( Though, thanks to the proliferation of streaming services and cable channels, as well as the ubiquity of home video, anyone who’s really interested in seeing a film ought to be able to track it down fairly quickly. And that’s changing the way we approach covering them in these pages.)
If more people saw more movies, their tastes would change. And they’d probably want different things from them than they want now. They’d probably use them in different ways. That doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently better about being an avid moviegoer as opposed to a casual moviegoer, just as there’s nothing nobler about being one of those people who never watches movies at all ( or, as one of my correspondents claims, haven’t seen a movie since 1972).
Still, I expected La La Land to win, because it was a candy- colored ( if not completely uplifting) story about plucky show biz kids. It was audaciously realized, and a lot of the things people criticize
about it — the callow vacuousness of the characters and their less than virtuoso song and dance skills — were not shortcomings but intentional baked- in qualities. Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling likely both knew how insufferable a character jazz pianist Seb was. Film criticism ought to be playful, and it’s perfectly fair to question the purism of the film’s would- be jazz savior, but its not fair to assume the writer- director and the actor were oblivious to Seb’s priggishness. Chazelle and Gosling understand jazz better than the character does.
While at the very least La La Land provides us with an interesting text to — to correctly use a word that has been misused a bit lately — deconstruct, I much prefer the dark and lyrical dreaminess of the Truffautian Moonlight to the primary brightness of La La Land. That’s really just an aesthetic choice, even though one of the reasons La La Land doesn’t seem genuinely magical is because I’d read a lot about it before seeing it. Had I had the experience our critic Piers Marchant had when he watched it, I would have responded differently. ( Piers really, really liked the film.)
Similarly, I wasn’t expecting much when I saw Moonlight — it’s one of those films that’s far better than its synopsis might lead one to expect. I figured it would be something gritty and sad — another street rat’s comingofage story. I didn’t expect tender poetry.
I’m not going to flatter the Academy by saying they got it right. They managed to almost entirely overlook one of the best mainstream movies of the past several years, Jeff Nichols’ subtle and intelligent Loving, which was neck and neck with Moonlight for my favorite film of 2016. But I don’t have much of an issue with Sunday’s winners.
This year the Oscars got it better.