We’ll
start with the obvious: holy crap! I was flabbergasted. While I wasn’t super into La La Land and was very glad to see Moonlight take home Best Picture, that
was not the way for it to go
down. Obviously, I felt bad for the La La Land folks, who managed to be
incredibly gracious in the face of a big disappointment, but I felt bad for the
Moonlight team, too. Yes, they won Best Picture, indisputably –
however, it couldn’t have felt like that in the moment. I’m sure most of their feelings were
somewhere between “No, wait – are you serious?
Are you actually serious? Is this
a joke?” and “So you’re basically saying, ‘Here, have the night’s most prestigious
award! All you have to do is tear it out
of your colleague’s hands!’” Plus, all
anyone’s talking about now is the screw-up, giving Moonlight’s actual big win less attention than it ought to be
getting. (Side note: is this the first movie about LGBTQ people to
win Best Picture? I went back as far as
2000, and while a handful have been nominated, none have won.)
But how
about the rest of it? Since my own preferred picks were very Lion-heavy,
I never saw Manchester by the Sea,
and I was pulling really hard for Moana to get Best Original Song, not
much went my way here. I was nothing but
happy for the following wins: Viola
Davis for Best Supporting Actress, Zootopia
for Best Animated Film, The Jungle Book for
Best Visual Effects, and Fantastic Beasts
and Where to Find Them for Best Costume Design. If Arrival
was only going to get one award, Best Sound Editing was a pretty well-deserved
one, and although I was rooting for Lion
folks for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, Moonlight also impressed me a lot in
both categories, so I can’t be mad about their wins there. I’m glad the whole night wasn’t the La La Land show, with Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea also picking up a few big awards each before Moonlight’s ultimate win, and I’m
particularly happy that La La Land
didn’t pick up Best Sound Mixing.
The
telecast was a mixed bag for me. I
thought most of Jimmy Kimmel’s bits fell flat (the best was the recurring Matt
Damon digs, and at least dropping cookies/candy from the ceiling by parachute
while the orchestra plays “Ride of the Valkyries” is a pretty expedient way to
get the now-annual “give the audience some food” routine out of the way.) For the most part, though, the proceedings
felt fairly plodding, with lots of dragged-out gags and pre-filmed insertions
that took forever. Meanwhile, I thought
most of the political stuff hit home quite well, even if they sometimes felt
dropped in without preamble – I appreciated the remarks sent by Asghar Farhadi
about the Muslim ban, Gael García Bernal referring to actors as “migrant
workers” and speaking against the wall, and other statements made over the
course of the night.
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