La di da, la di da, La La … Moonlight: Best Picture winner stuns in more ways than one

Writer-director Barry Jenkins accepts the Academy Award for Best Picture for Moonlight.

I am still processing what I just saw. The erroneous announcement of La La Land as Best Picture will go down as the biggest gaffe in Academy Awards history. There can be none bigger. Moonlight is your Best Picture winner of 2016. It is the most deserving of the nominated films, and writer-director Barry Jenkins and his cast and crew earned their spot in the sun. But, wow, what a way to step into that moment.

Your heart just sinks for the producers of La La Land, particularly Jordan Horowitz, who was standing at the microphone, pouring his heart out in gratitude, and clutching his Oscar when that frankly shocking announcement took place. I cannot begin to imagine the heartbreak to have achieved your dream for nearly a full minute before it is dashed to pieces on a stage in front of 100 million viewers the world over. Horowitz was incredibly gracious, standing tall in the face of an impossible moment, and stating his pride at getting to hand the award over to such a remarkable film as Moonlight.

Best Picture presenter Warren Beatty’s explanation was both reasonable and confounding, leaving several questions, including how he ended up with the wrong card in his hands. Most importantly, though, the Academy has safeguards in place for just such an occurrence, so how did the folks behind the scenes allow the La La Land filmmakers onstage and almost completely through their speeches before correcting their mistake?

La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz shows the card naming Moonlight Best Picture.

It was an embarrassment of great magnitude for everyone but the artists involved. It stole away what would have been a truly stunning moment of victory for Moonlight, a moment that would have gone down as one of the greatest in recent Academy history, and turned it into a circus. We are not more than a half-hour removed from that moment as I type this, and it remains hard to understand what we witnessed. I am overjoyed for Jenkins and Moonlight, but I will not feel the full weight of the win until tomorrow, when the fog of this absurd ending hopefully will have cleared.

The shame is that this ceremony was on its way to being one of the best Oscars ceremonies in a long time. Jimmy Kimmel made for a wonderfully funny, self-effacing host, if not particularly fleet for an evening that ran just a tad long. The recurring gag with the snacks falling from the ceiling was delightful, and the trick of bringing in a busload of tourists for the most amazing surprise party in history was inspired.

The winners gave uniformly magnificent speeches that spoke to everyone across the world and delivered messages of love, hope, acceptance, and defiance in the face of oppression. In particular, Best Supporting Actress winner Viola Davis stole the show – at least until the evening was hijacked by a misplaced envelope. Wins for movies like The Salesman, The White Helmets, and O.J.: Made in America showed a streak of protest ran deep through these awards, and the power of their victories hopefully will outlast the memory of the only moment anyone will talk about tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Moonlight’s victory, even apart from its circumstances, was a genuine stunner, but there were indications throughout the night Damien Chazelle’s front-running Hollywood musical was vulnerable. The first came in when Colleen Atwood picked up her fourth career Oscar for Best Costume Design for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, beating out Mary Zophres’ work on La La Land. If Chazelle and Co. were going to sweep, it would have started there.

Next came the sound awards, which went to Arrival (Sound Editing) and Hacksaw Ridge (Sound Mixing). La La Land would have been a mild surprise in Sound Editing, but rarely do nominated musicals lose Sound Mixing. By that point, the presumed juggernaut was 0-for-3. The headline in the sound categories, though, really should be Kevin O’Connell, a winner for Hacksaw Ridge and no longer the record holder for most nominations without a win. On his 21st try, O’Connell finally made it onto the stage, and it was among the best moments of the night.

La La Land did not pick up its first award of the night until nearly two hours into the show for Best Production Design, but after losing Best Editing to Hacksaw Ridge, it felt like something might be in the air. A lot of movies with no realistic shot at the top prize were picking up awards that had been earmarked by most pundits, yours truly included, for La La Land. Meanwhile, Moonlight kicked off the proceedings with a well-deserved win for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor. Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney later picked up Best Adapted Screenplay, while Chazelle lost Original Screenplay to Kenneth Lonergan for Manchester by the Sea.

Viola Davis wins Best Supporting Actress for Fences.

Heading into the final four awards of the night, La La Land had gone just 4-for-10, bolstered by a pair of wins for Original Song and Original Score that were as good as preordained, though on this night, such impressions were proved foolish at best. However, when Chazelle picked up Best Director and Emma Stone Best Actress – in between Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea) beat out Denzel Washington (Fences) at the wire for Best Actor – it felt like the musical was back on track.

Six awards in tow, La La Land was back and chugging its way to the big one, which it won ever-so briefly. Its train was not just derailed, though. It was a crash of epic proportions, and all the blame falls on the shoulders of the Academy. The group’s detractors will laugh and point, and the U.S. president, perhaps with nothing better to do with his time, will probably tweet derisively. There is no doubt Hollywood’s biggest night ended in unprecedented fashion, a manner that will overshadow, hopefully only in the short term, all the good that was accomplished.

In time, I hope the underlying truths of the evening will lodge better in the cultural consciousness than a poorly timed mistake. For roughly the first three hours and 35 minutes, the Oscars ceremony was a beautiful ode to connection and transcendence through art. It delivered a message of hope and inclusivity to peoples all over the world. The final 10 minutes were a colossal disaster, but the triumph of Moonlight as Best Picture of the year only reinforces the ideas of hope, tolerance, love, and acceptance that I will take away from the evening, scandal be damned.

For a full list of winners, click here.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Supporting Actor

Michael Shannon is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Nocturnal Animals.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day leading up to the ceremony for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories and more.

Best Supporting Actor

The nominees are:

Mahershala Ali for Moonlight

Jeff Bridges for Hell or High Water

Lucas Hedges for Manchester by the Sea

Dev Patel for Lion

Michael Shannon for Nocturnal Animals

This is an unusual year in that none of the characters portrayed by these five men is a villain. Supporting Actor generally is the home of the villain at the Oscars. There was a run from 2007-2009 when Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight), and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) won this award for playing over-the-top, larger-than-life villains who steal their respective films right out from under the heroes. Just two years ago, JK Simmons swept up every award in sight for his mercilessly villainous role in Whiplash.

The reasons for this over-representation of villainy seem clear enough. From the earliest films noirs through the Bond villains of the 1960s right on through to today, writers have crafted their antagonists as witty, urbane, fun, and out-sized, while actors dig right in every time, chewing up scenery and stealing the show. Villains have always been big, and the Academy loves to reward big. How wonderful, then, this year, the actors went another way.

Beyond not being villains, it would be hard to characterize any of these performances as any one thing. They are complex, three-dimensional portraits of mostly good people trying to do the best they can in worlds of limited options. The five nominated actors here do not so much steal the show as weave themselves into the fabric of the stories being told. They disappear in their roles and resurface in these characters to give us a better understanding of their points of view and their experiences.

Mahershala Ali for Moonlight – In a year of complex character studies, few characters are as complex or as studied as Ali’s Juan, a kind-hearted drug dealer who befriends and scared, lonely young boy. There is never any question of Juan’s status within his community – he is a kingpin and rules over all he surveys. He commands respect at every turn and gets it. He lives a hard life on hard streets in hard times, but he refuses to let his circumstances make him a hard man. Such is the power of a script that exists solely to force the audience to confront its prejudices and preconceived notions.

None of this would land as well, however, without Ali’s strong, confident performance at its heart. He infuses his character with a gentleness you would not expect. He displays a tenderness he not only refuses to bury but even seems eager to share. Ali is quiet and still, communicating in small gestures and nods, letting the world – and thereby, the audience – come to him. Juan only appears in the first of the film’s three acts, but Ali’s performance makes us feel both his absence and his impact throughout the rest of the story.

Dev Patel for Lion – I complain every year about category fraud, and I promise – or warn, as the case may be – I will rail about it tomorrow, when we discuss Best Supporting Actress. The fraud here is more subtle. Lion is the story of Saroo Brierly and his long journey to find the family he lost. The film’s opening 45-50 minutes concern Saroo’s early life, and in these passages, he is played wonderfully by Sunny Pawar. The second half of the film – more than, if we wish to count minutes – is the adult Saroo’s search for his family, when he is portrayed by Patel. But make no mistake: This is Patel’s film, and he carries it magnificently.

It is sometimes baffling to me the way these things go down. Patel faced the same scenario in 2008, when he was campaigned in Supporting Actor for Slumdog Millionaire despite being the demonstrable lead of the film. The difference is he was not nominated then, and he is now. However, he was deserving then, and he is deserving now. To focus too much on these awards distinctions, as I have done, perhaps distracts from Patel’s powerful work in Lion.

He must embody both sorrow and rage, grief for the family he lost and anger at the world that would allow this to happen. He is by turns the well-adjusted adopted son of Australian parents and the mournful, emotionally guarded orphan torn from his family. Patel is remarkable in all facets of this character, and were it not for the fact American films rarely cast actors of Indian heritage in leading roles, he would be a much bigger star even than he is. Let us hope such casting prejudices change and Patel soon takes his rightful place among the acting elite.

Jeff Bridges for Hell or High Water – An interesting bit of Academy Awards trivia: Katherine Hepburn holds the record for the longest span between an actor’s first and last nomination – 48 years from Morning Glory in 1933 to On Golden Pond in 1981. Bridges, now on his seventh nomination, earned his first in 1972 for The Last Picture Show, 45 years ago. If things keep going the way they have been, this will not be his last nomination, and we will not see that last nomination hopefully for a long, long time.

In the current decade, Bridges has settled into a comfortable groove, playing tough, grizzled men who cannot afford to show weakness but whose world weariness has taken a toll. He won his first, and to date only, Oscar for just such a role in Crazy Heart and was most recently nominated for perhaps the most grizzled hero of all, Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. In Hell or High Water, he offers a new take on this archetype as a southern lawman whose only purpose is justice in a world that no longer seems to know what that word means.

Lucas Hedges for Manchester by the Sea – Bridges had already secured three nominations by the time fellow nominee Hedges was born in 1997. It calls to mind, for me at least, the time in 1999 when Michael Caine, during his acceptance speech for The Cider House Rules, shouted out his co-nominees, including an 11-year-old Haley Joel Osment, there for The Sixth Sense. It is one of the things that makes the Oscars ceremony so beautiful, the different generations of artists all coming together to celebrate each other’s work.

Hedges is wonderful in Manchester by the Sea as Patrick, a teenager whose father dies unexpectedly and is left in the care of his uncle (Casey Affleck). Hedges brings to the part the right mixture of general teenage angst and self-centeredness and more specific, restrained grief over the loss of his father. His breakdown scene while putting meat in the freezer – reminding him of his father’s body being kept on ice until the ground thaws enough to bury him – is one of the great moments in cinema this year. Though his feature credits to this point represent a limited list, including small parts in Wes Anderson’s two most recent films, Hedges’ future seems limitless.

Michael Shannon for Nocturnal Animals – I have spent a fair amount of space on this site over the years talking about the greatness of Michael Shannon. He is among my favorite performers working today, and he will win an Oscar sooner or later. He should have been nominated last year for 99 Homes, and it is hard not to think this nomination, though deserving in its own right, is a make-good for his just missing the nod last time.

No matter. Make-good or not, Shannon commands the screen with his intimidating frame and overwhelming presence, taking over as the skewed moral center of Nocturnal Animals. He plays Bobby, a lawman helping Jake Gyllenhaal’s character seek revenge against the men who wronged him. In an otherwise uneven film, all of the performances are great, but Shannon stands tall above them all. Audiences are instinctively drawn to this mysterious live wire of a character, and Shannon masterfully pulls us deeper into his web like one of Bobby’s ill-fated criminal targets.

The final analysis

This category presents an interesting conundrum this year. The signs point to Ali. He was the critics’ favorite choice for supporting actor, and he won the Screen Actors Guild award. On top of that, Moonlight is a clearly beloved film, and the character of Juan and Ali’s performance in the film’s early passages are unforgettable.

However, apart from the Screen Actors Guild, the two biggest Academy Award precursors are the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs. Ali was beaten to the Golden Globe by Nocturnal Animals star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who is not nominated here, and to the BAFTA at yesterday’s ceremony by Patel. Now, Patel is British, and it is possible the British Academy was looking to reward one of its own, but it certainly gives us pause in predicting this category.

Perhaps the BAFTAs are an indication Patel has the momentum and the inside track to the Oscar, though he has picked up almost no other awards this season. Perhaps the frayed nature of the precursors with three different actors winning at the three different shows suggests anything can happen, such as a Shannon or Bridges win. But maybe – and I think this is most likely – the winds really are blowing the direction they are pointing, and these other victories are simply misdirection on the road to Ali’s well-deserved coronation.

Will win: Mahershala Ali for Moonlight

Should win: Mahershala Ali for Moonlight

Should have been here: Ben Foster for Hell or High Water

Tomorrow: Best Supporting Actress

Year in Review: Top 10 Performances of 2016

Much of this list speaks for itself – and in the many words written below – but I would be remiss not to point out the top two performances below come from the same film. They are, taken together, remarkable in such a way as to exist beyond the bounds of a list such as this. They represent two of the finest actors in the business delivering some of the greatest lines ever written in a way that nearly breaks the form. I discuss them individually below, but in truth, they cannot be separated. They are dependent on one another in the way the Earth is dependent on the sun. Make of this what you will.

Before we get to the top 10, here are five more performances worth your time and attention: Annette Bening in 20th Century Women; Rachel Weisz in The Lobster; Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in Loving; and Ralph Fiennes in The Big Splash.

10. Tom Bennett for Love & Friendship

The world of Jane Austen, as filtered through the lens of writer-director Whit Stillman, is one of high class and high manners, of subtlety and sobriety, so leave it to Stillman to splash a character like Sir James Martin across the screen. As played by Bennett, Martin is a dolt of the highest order, his profound ignorance matched only by his guileless good humor.

He marvels at peas – yes, the vegetable – praises the 12 commandments then is shocked to find out there are only 10, and is delighted to have realized the name of the estate at which he is staying is Churchill and he need not have searched for a church on a hill. Staying firmly within the Stillman tradition of rapid-fire dialogue and sharp satire, Bennett pitches his performance to just the right level of absurdity as to stay believable but transcend into hilarity at the drop of a hat.

9. Sandra Hüller for Toni Erdmann

Writer-director Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann is remarkable for many things, not the least of which its success at turning a serious condemnation of sexism in the business world into a three-hour farce littered with humor and pathos. Its star, Hüller, carries the weight of both ends of the story. She must be a woman marginalized within her office, frustrated by her obvious talent being overlooked, but she must also exist in the absurdist comedy world Ade creates. Hüller is more than up to the task.

For evidence of this, look no further than Hüller’s much discussed, rightly lauded performance of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” somewhere after the midpoint of the film. By this time, she is exhausted by her father’s shenanigans – and plain exhausted and overworked – but somehow, she lets him talk her into performing for a group of strangers at a party. Hüller’s slow build from reluctant participant to hammy belting is a thing of beauty. She is a joy to watch, as is this film.

8. Ben Foster for Hell or High Water

If Foster were not so good at playing live wires and loose cannons, I would say it was time for him to move on to something else, but he just is that damn good. This is a bit reductive, of course, as Foster has shown plenty of range throughout his career, from early work on Six Feet Under to The Messenger. However, it is the wild, unhinged characters, capable of anything at any moment, equal parts frightening and seductive, for which Foster will always be best remembered.

He reaches perhaps the apex of that kind of character – though never count out Foster for finding new levels of insanity to portray – as Tanner Howard in David Mackenzie’s widely loved western cops-and-robbers saga Hell or High Water. As a bank robber just recently out of prison but fighting alongside his brother for a just cause, Foster imbues Tanner with enough heart that no matter where the script takes the character – and it gets plenty dark and violent – the audience never loses sight of his true purpose. He is a man who wants to do right, but his only path to it is through wrongdoing.

7. Isabelle Huppert for Elle

How many actresses get to this point in their careers – more than 100 credits to her name, international acclaim, a storied career working with some of the most brilliant directors around – and choose to do a movie like this? Only Huppert, I imagine. Only Huppert could take such a risk on a Paul Verhoeven vehicle about rape, revenge, fantasy, and womanhood. Only Huppert could have the courage to play a sexual assault survivor as both victim and pursuer. Only Huppert could play a woman facing down the demons in her soul, as well as the evils that surround her. Only Huppert.

After making her onscreen debut in 1971, Huppert has spent a lifetime taking chances, and she has never shied away from the ugly, dirty, angry side of the characters she plays. Her character in Elle, Michèle Leblanc, is often cold, cruel, and calculating, and Huppert makes us sympathize with her without softening her. She is allowed to be strong and confident without worry for what others will think. It is a radical and bracing portrait of femininity few actresses would dare tackle. In fact, I can think of just one.

6. Casey Affleck for Manchester by the Sea

Affleck has been among the best actors of his generation for some time. He has not exactly been prolific of late, but what he lacks in volume, he makes up for in quality, never failing to deliver authentic, lived-in performances whether in ensemble heist comedies like the Ocean’s series or in dark, impressionistic thrillers like Ain’t Them Bodies Saints or The Killer Inside Me. Reports of his treatment of the women he has worked with, including multiple claims of sexual harassment, cannot be ignored, but the work stands apart from that.

As Lee Chandler, grieving as much for the life he could have lived but did not as for the death of his brother, Affleck delivers a typically on point portrayal of pain, anguish, and fear. Lee has shut himself off from the world so long, he no longer knows how to reach out and connect, even when he knows he must. For his sake and the sake of his family, he tries over and over again to bring out something in himself that must have been there once – we see it in flashbacks – but he is fishing in a river that has run dry. Affleck expertly sells the weight of this struggle in his body, his voice, and his whole being.

5. Mahershala Ali for Moonlight

Moonlight is broken into three distinct acts, each showing a different stage in the life of a boy growing up in Miami. Ali appears only in the first act, but the monumental force of the character he and writer-director Barry Jenkins create brings into being the rest of the events of the film. Moonlight is predicated on its ability to challenge the assumptions we make about others, and nowhere is that more clear than in the character of Juan, the gentle drug lord who takes a scared young boy under his wing.

Juan does not seek to mold the boy into anything. He simply shows him kindness, which in this world is enough of a miracle. Ali, probably best known for his work on Netflix series House of Cards and Luke Cage, does not force his will onto the character. There are no big, showy moments, no actorly affectations. He lets Juan flow through him so naturally and gracefully it simply sweeps the audience along.

4. Natalie Portman for Jackie

Jacqueline Kennedy is an icon, her place in the public imagination firmly entrenched. As an icon, she is an ideal to which people aspire, an inspiration, a shining example of the best of who a people can be. Yet, she was also a person, a woman, a wife, a mother, whose life was marred by tragedy and whose grief was felt on the grandest stage imaginable. The world is quite familiar with the icon, but Portman’s daring, subtle, and sublime work in Jackie shows us the person.

Taking place mostly in the few days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Portman takes us into the mind of a woman who has been forever altered by her circumstances but refuses to be broken. The actress nails the mannered speech patterns and stiff gait of the upper-crust debutante, but the performance is not built on its imitations. It is built on the quiet, devastating moments in which Jackie is alone, looking at her tired visage in the mirror and wondering what could possibly come next for her. This is where Portman shines.

3. Colin Farrell for The Lobster

What a ride it has been to follow Farrell over these 20-odd years. He has been in enough bad films and disastrous flops to kill five careers, but he keeps coming back, and every once in a while, he gives us a gem like this. Though he has never seemed like a vain actor, Farrell has always projected an easy cool, a breezy charm that makes him easy to root for in his performances. There is none of that here. As the schlubby, awkward, near-sighted David, he inhabits the character so fully the entire movie-star persona he has cultivated just disappears.

At first, Farrell would seem an odd pairing with a director as iconoclastic as modern Greek master Yorgos Lanthimos, but as a man trapped within a dystopian bureaucracy, he embodies the perfect mix of vulnerability and resignation, hope and despair. Lanthimos creates a world that has beaten down its characters until they are empty husks, flat, monotone cyphers on which the system can project its own needs. Farrell commits to this risky characterization so thoroughly he brings the audience along into this disquieting world and makes us long for his release from it.

2. Viola Davis for Fences

If it is not clear by now, it should be made so: Davis is a national treasure. She is an actress of such skill and range as to elevate instantly whatever material she is given. Imagine then some of the greatest material ever written placed in her hands, and you will have some idea of what she achieves as Rose Maxon, Troy’s long-suffering wife. She has stood by him and shown nothing but kindness, patience, and grace, but she is not weak, far from it. She is the rock on which their marriage is founded, and her shock and anger at her husband’s misdeeds are as righteous as anything you will see.

Davis has been onscreen for 20 years and onstage longer. Her early roles included parts in several Steven Soderbergh films, as well as Denzel Washington’s directorial debut, Antwone Fisher, but I suspect most of us first took real notice of her for her brilliant, shattering work in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. She has only one scene, but her impact is so great it leaves a void in the rest of the film.

She has gone on to great acclaim and notoriety with her television show, How to Get Away with Murder, and like all great actors of this era, she even joined a comic book universe for DC (Suicide Squad, remember what I said about elevating material?). She should probably already have an Oscar or two, and if she does not win for this performance, it will be a scandal. She is the heart and soul of Fences, its emotional center of gravity, and she makes it look as effortless as cooling a pie on the windowsill.

1. Denzel Washington for Fences

What else could this be but Washington in the role that should come to define the latter portion of his career? Washington might be the most consistent and consistently wonderful actor of all time. His carefully curated career is marked by excellent genre work, smart crowd-pleasers, and a handful of stone-cold classics. He is incapable of giving an inauthentic performance, and as much as his movie-star persona informs his screen presence, he never lets it inform his acting.

As retired ballplayer and garbage man Troy Maxon, the first half of the film is given over almost entirely to Washington reciting playwright August Wilson’s many stirring monologues. Washington finds every moment, every nuance, every turn of phrase and makes it his own. He hugs the curves of Wilson’s words like a racecar driver, steering into the littlest details and taking us along for the ride.

This obviously was a deeply personal project for Washington, who directs and stars in this adaptation not long after finishing his run in the Broadway revival of the play. As personal as it must be for him, though, Washington’s performance makes it universal. Troy is every one of us who longs for more than he has been given, but he is no mere symbol. He is a living, breathing human being, and that is thanks to Wilson’s words and Washington’s career-topping performance delivering them.

Check back tomorrow as we conclude our Year in Review series with Last Cinema Standing's Top 10 Films of 2016.