What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2016

The Year: 2016
What the Nominees Were: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: 20th Century Women was pretty great. Two movies that were nominated for Animated Feature that could have gotten Picture nominations are Moana and Zootopia.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Moonlight
How Hard Was the Decision: I do love Arrival, but Moonlight is a very worthy winner.

Director: Barry Jenkins
Writer: Jenkins, based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.”
Stars: Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Ashton Sanders, Jharrel Jerome, Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali

The Story: We follow the life history of Chiron at three different points: First as a little kid in a poor Miami neighborhood, scared into silence, who is helped by a local drug dealer named Juan. Then we meet him as a teenager, discovering his homosexuality and getting in trouble with the law, and finally as an adult, dealing drugs and trying to reconnect with his first love.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Supporting Actor for Ali and Adapted Screenplay. It lost Director, Supporting Actress for Harris, Cinematography, Editing and Score.
How It Won: It didn’t at first! Nobody was that surprised when Warren Beatty falsely announced (because of an envelope switch) that La La Land had won. The producers of that movie got through their speeches before anybody realized that a mistake had been made and the Moonlight filmmakers were belatedly called up to give their own speeches. Indeed, Hollywood loves itself and La La Land seemed like a shoo-in, but Moonlight was just so damn good that it overcame the Academy’s aversion to Black and gay stories.

Why It Won:

1. The world will talk at a hero, but one of the strongest reactions that hero can have is silence. We see how little Chiron’s silence isolates him, but also how it elicits both frustration and sympathy from those who try to reach him. Every time he refuses to respond, he asserts his power over the speaker more profoundly than he could by speaking, and becomes a more compelling character. It feels very counterintuitive to write dialogue in which there’s no dialogue, but it can be just as compelling as a two-sided conversation.
   
2. Ideally this would have been shot like Boyhood over the course of 15 years, so we could have seen one actor at all three ages, but they didn’t have that luxury. Luckily the three actors that play Chiron at different ages work really well together. It’s to Jenkins’ credit that it’s entirely convincing that they’re all three playing the same character (though he has changed so much that the three are playing quite different people.)
   
3. Jenkins and McCraney met through this project and discovered that they grew up in Miami within blocks of each other and had very similar childhoods (both similar to Chiron’s). Interestingly, the play intercut the stories of the three Chirons at different ages, and it was a twist that they were all the same character. I think playing the story chronologically in the film was a good call.
4. This was the second lowest-grossing Oscar winner (behind, surprisingly, The Hurt Locker) with makes it all the more remarkable that it pulled off the win. It’s frankly astonishing that the Academy recognized a story of gay Black manhood. Keep in mind that I’ve given Oscars to Brokeback Mountain and Milk, but the Academy did not, so it was amazing that this was the one that finally broke through. It’s a testament to the simple universal power of the story.
   
5. As you can tell from the Oscar win, Mahershala Ali dominates the movie, despite very little screen time. The scene where he teaches Chiron how to swim, with the camera dipping into and out of the water line, is literally and figuratively buoyant, keeping a very heavy story afloat. Tiny moments of transcendence from a bleak life come to define Chiron’s story.