Why Did Moonlight Beat La La Land? A Dicussion

We're a long way since the 50's and 60's when the general populace generally gave much of a shit about what happened at the Academy Awards. But the race for Best Picture of 2016 is one I occasionally still hear people on the street bring up in casual conversation. Mostly because of the absolute shit show that occurred when that award was announced. When win talk about the win we often talk about the mistake so much to the point it's become a meme. But I feel as if that does both films a disservice because it neglects the various factors both related to the films and outside of them that led to the win. So in this post I want to go over why I think Moonlight ultimately beat La La Land and what factors may have contributed to it winning.

The biggest factor I think that contributed to Moonlight winning was the sociopolitical climate at the time. A common thing I hear is that Moonlight won because the Academy wanted to be 'woke'. While I think that's a pretty reductive take overall I do think that the execution of the themes in Moonlight put it over the edge. Around this time the Academy was under fire from the #OscarsSoWhite campaign. The common idea is that this mostly just about more Black people getting Oscar recognition. But in actuality it addresses a larger trend of the Academy ignoring films by non-white/non-European artists and filmmakers. Paired with this were discussions about larger trends within the industry as it concerns financing films by and about non-white/non-European people and cultures. This isn't to say films with many non-white people in the cast and crew haven't won before. 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture a few years ago making Steve McQueen the first and to date the only Black filmmaker to win an Oscar for producing. Black actors had also won in the supporting categories prior to this. In fact, if you aren't white or European your best shot at even getting nominated for an acting Oscar is in the supporting category. There's also controversy for the roles they tend to win and get nominations for but we're not getting into that right now.

To address these concerns, the Academy added more diverse members to their roster and they've continued to do this. I have no doubt these more diverse members helped Moonlight win. In fact a lot of films owe their wins and nominations to those more diverse members. Lion, Fences and Hidden Figures all got multiple nominations in acting and all three also were nominated for Best Picture. But I do think the heat the Academy was under at the time pushed them to focus a bit more on the content of the two films. Moonlight is journey through the life of a closeted gay Black man in the ghettos of Miami and subtly addresses how racism and the War on Drugs affects Black families and ideas about masculinity in the Black community. La La Land is a glittering spectacle of a musical about two young artists trying to make their dreams come true. La La Land is a film that could have been made/set in 1955 or in 2016 without changing much besides the references to modern technology. That's not an accident. Director Damien Chazelle has said on multiple occasions that the goal of the production team was to present the film as a homage to musicals from the 40's and 50's. It's the kind of film you could simply read the script for and tell that this is going to be a crowd pleaser.

But La La Land isn't exactly the deepest film. It's well made but I would never call it complex and to be fair I don't think that was the point. Unless we're talking about A Star is Born most musicals from the 40's and 50's were largely straightforward family friendly films that didn't directly address difficult or complex themes. Even if Moonlight hadn't been nominated I still think La La Land would've possibly lost and I believe it would've been to Manchester By the Sea which is basically just one long gut punch of a movie. La La Land was nominated for 14 Oscars and won roughly half of them. But some critics, and I'm including myself in this, feel like many of the nominations were coattail nominations. This happens a lot when the Academy loves a film so much they nominate it practically everywhere they can. For a recent example see Mank. La La Land lost in Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing and Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Editing and of course Best Picture. No one was expecting a clean sweep but La La Land losing in some key categories like in Editing and Sound doesn't bode well for a musical. There are a lot of critics who thought the nomination for the screenplay was unnecessary and that goes back to many feeling the film didn't really have a lot to say. That award went to Manchester By The Sea.

Moonlight on the other hand is probably one of the most complex nuanced and layered films nominated that year. The others would be Manchester by the Sea, Lion, Fences and The Salesman. But by no means is it a crowd pleaser in the traditional sense. It's Dr. Zhivago but it's also not Titanic. If I were to compare it to another recent Best Picture winner I'd say it's more similar to Spotlight. Obviously they are about completely different things but they're slower paced dramas about complex social issues with a supporting cast and relatively few to no major set pieces. Both feel more like stage plays where La La Land is basically a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical for the modern day. But that also plays to Moonlight's advantage. Academy members get screeners and Moonlight plays a lot better on a TV or laptop than La La Land which benefits from the movie theater experience. Moonlight is also culturally important in a way La Land Land is not. It is by no means the first Black independent film to be made but it is one the few films we have that address the complexities and nuances of being both Black and queer. Again there are others like Punks, The Watermelon Woman, Tangerine, Dirty Laundry and The Skinny but it's not an extensive list. Moonlight also possesses a quality in filmmaking and acting that very few micro budget films regardless of content tend to have. In addition to the racial politics at the time, Moonlight came out a year after same sex marriage was legalized in the United States. Moonlight also came out about ten years after Brokeback Mountain which was another landmark LGBT film. Awards aren't entirely about the film itself. We've seen before and since Moonlight that the social climate surrounding a film can matter just as much as the actual content.

Also and this is just my own personal theory, supporting role nominations matter a lot in determining a Best Picture winner. It's not always set in stone and you don't always even need said supporting roles to win. But speaking from my personal experience in directing on the stage and screen, it is a lot more difficult to make a smaller role leave an impact than a leading one. This is especially so if the piece is an ensemble where there really isn't a lead role to speak of. La La Land is buoyed by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, although both have done better work before and since then. There isn't anyone I could even think of in La La Land who'd you nominated for a supportingperformance and if you're just asking me I wouldn't have nominated Ryan Gosling either, like I said he's been better. Moonlight is an ensemble piece where actors have to portray a character at different points in their life. So Barry Jenkins and all three actors for Kevin and Chiron had to work closely in making sure that each different actor all felt like the same person. That is incredibly hard to do especially when you are working with kids and relatively new actors.

People are going to debate this win, have at it, but I kind of like how things unfolded that night. Maybe it's just me but it felt like a kind of passing of the torch of the type of films that normally win and what can win from that point forward. I also like this win because 1) I don't think La La Land is that great of a musical and 2) the legacy of Moonlight's win both in the Academy Awards and the industry itself can be felt. We are seeing a lot more films both big budget and not that deal with complex themes with the type of casts you typically wouldn't see. These movies are getting seen by more audiences and as a result, at least I hope, that our collective understanding and appreciation for the variety of the human experience has expanded. Films like Minari, Roma, Mudbound and others can be viewed as 'prestige' films. I would even go as far as to say that Moonlight helped open the door for a film like Parasite to be even considered as a film that could win Best Picture. I say this because as much as that night was a win for the Black creative community there were many other communities wondering when was their shot. This opened up a lot more discussions about what diversity in film can really mean. A lot of critics and filmmakers at the time, again myself included, remarked that if foreign films were given much more of a shot in majoe other categories, especially films from non-European countries, then a lot of the issues surrounding diversity would ebb. We have seen that come to past in the last few years. By expanding our definition of what is 'prestige' cinema we expand our idea of what stories and the people they represent matter and which ones don't.

So what do you think? What if your opinion pushed Moonlight over the edge? What are you thoughts about that awards season in general? I still have a lot of thoughts. Please sound off in the comments.