'Moonlight' wins Best Picture in an unforgettable TV moment
WOW. So...what can I even say???? This will go down as the infamous ceremony where the WRONG BEST PICTURE WINNER was actually announced on live television, given out, the winners were in the middle of their acceptance speeches, and then mayhem commenced as the mistake was realized, leading La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz to declare that Moonlight had won Best Picture, not them! Jaws dropped in the room, across the country and around the world, as confusion spread, seemingly in slow motion while the befuddled Moonlight winners then got onstage and the crushed La La Land people retreated, having to hand over their statues. Unbelievable! How did this happen?? Apparently Warren Beatty was given a duplicate of the Best Actress envelope with Emma Stone's win printed in it, which he didn't realize until he opened it, and clearly flustered and not knowing what to do, he handed it to Faye Dunaway, who blurted out La La Land as the winner, leading to the epic fail. This ultimately robbed the Moonlight crew from being able to have their moment unsullied, while simultaneously humiliating the La La Land team for good measure. In all 89 years of Oscar history, never before has such a thing occurred.
- Best Picture: Moonlight
- Best Director: Damien Chazelle, La La Land
- Best Actress: Emma Stone, La La Land
- Best Actor: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea
- Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis, Fences
- Best Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
- Best Adapted Screenplay: Moonlight
- Best Original Screenplay: Manchester by the Sea
- Best Foreign Language Film: The Salesman
- Best Animated Feature: Zootopia
- Best Film Editing: Hacksaw Ridge
- Best Cinematography: La La Land
- Best Original Score: La La Land
- Best Original Song: “City of Stars,” La La Land
- Best Costume Design: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
- Best Documentary Feature: O.J.: Made in America
- Best Production Design: La La Land
- Best Visual Effects: The Jungle Book
- Best Sound Editing: Arrival
- Best Sound Mixing: Hacksaw Ridge
- Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Suicide Squad
- Best Short Film, Animated: Piper
- Best Documentary, Short Subject: The White Helmets
- Best Short Film, Live Action: Sing
Aside from the last five minutes, everything else that happened in the show feels ancient. I completely screwed up the techs on my predictions, leading to a pathetic 15/24 score (ugh), but seriously, who cares after that wild finish? And we do have to take a moment here to appreciate the fact that Moonlight, a $1.5 million budgeted movie about gay black men in Miami, won BEST PICTURE at the Academy Awards! That's incredible. This is the same academy that voted for Crash over Brokeback Mountain eleven years ago, which had been the biggest Best Picture upset ever until now. La La Land had won the DGA, PGA, BAFTA, Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards. How did it lose??? That alone is unprecedented. All I can think is that the backlash to awarding a fluffy musical over more important subject matter during this politically charged time we live in, must have had an impact during the voting after all. That and the preferential ballot they use for tallying Best Picture (ranking the films), in which a close race can make the movie that garners a lot of #2 and #3 votes just as important, if not more so, than #1's. That's how Spotlight won last year. La La Land was apparently much more divisive than people realized. It still won 6 Oscars to Moonlight's 3, so both films go home with big wins, but another interesting stat is that under this system of voting, only once in the last five years has Best Picture and Best Director lined up. That's a HUGE shift in Oscar history. Not since the 1930's have they seen such division in those two awards, which for decades had been so closely linked. But all stats aside, nothing can beat that crazy moment at the end of the show, already set to go down as the most insane in the history of the ceremony. What a strange and stunning ending. It was an unforgettable television moment.
Jimmy Kimmel hosts the 89th Academy Awards
