Its just an awards show. We hate to see people disappointed.

Thus spokehost Jimmy Kimmel at the wild conclusion to the 2017 Academy Awards, which ended with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty mistakenly announcing that La La Land had been awarded Best Picture an error thatwas reversed only after the acceptance speecheshad begun. Moonlight, director Barry Jenkins piercing portrait of a young gay mans growing-up in Miamis Liberty City neighborhood was named the actual Best Picture.

It was a confusing, crushing spectacle made worse bythe way the two movies had been pitted against each other in the run-up to the ceremony: The outcome of the contest for Best Picture set up as a referendum on Hollywoods racial attitudes and ability to see beyond movies that celebrate the entertainment industry itself.

La La Land had been subjected to scorching criticism in the run-up to the Academy Awards, some of which to me has read as critics in search of damning arguments. The light, sweet musicalis not, as some have alleged, about a white man saving jazz as an art form. Instead, it has a plot about how a black artist (John Legend) is doing more to find jazz new audiences than a white jazz purist (Ryan Gosling), though it does include a scene in which that white manexplains to a white woman (Emma Stone) why he loves the music so much. It is not a crass celebration of careerism over love; in fact, its rueful and clear about the sacrifices the characters have made along the way, and the pain those choices caused them. And given everything else thats happening in American civic life and geopolitics, a win for La La Land would probably not even register on the scale of as one headline put it a disaster for Hollywood and us.

But Im hard-pressed to imagine that even the people belittling La La Land are getting much satisfaction from the schaedenfreude of themoment. It must be shattering to have the best moment of your professional life arrive, to be filmed celebrating it in footage that will become an inevitable part of Hollywood history and Oscar commentary for years to come and then to have the moment pass. And it wasnt even a member of the Oscar team whoannounced the error: La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz ended up passing the Oscar and the torch to the Moonlight team.

For asawful as I feel for everyone involved with La La Land, whats even worse about this colossal error is the way it denied everyone involved with Moonlight their moment of triumph: from being announced as winners in an uncomplicated way with an untainted round of applause, and from getting to give acceptance speeches out from under the shadow of people who had already spoken and who had suffered a crushing disappointment.

Marisa Tomei has lived for years with the rumorsthat her Best Supporting Actress award for My Cousin Vinnie was a mistake. The Moonlight team will at least be spared that, since the official card certifying their win was displayed for the camera.

Moonlight was made by an extraordinary group of people: from Jenkins to playwrightTarell Alvin McCraney who accepted theBest Adapted Screenplay Oscar with Jenkins; to stars Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes, who play the films main character, Chiron, as a child, a teenager and a young man; to Mahershala Ali, who was named Best Supporting Actor for his work as the sensitive drug dealer Juan who recognizes something fragile and rare in Chiron and tries to protect it; to Janelle Monae and Naomie Harris, who played the women in Chirons life; and to Jaden Piner,Jharrel Jerome andAndr Holland, who play Kevin, the love of Chirons life. They dont deserve to feel second-best or like their win was snatched from the abyss at the last moment, and delivered to them in tainted, diminished terms. I hate that this happened to them.

And I hate that the contest between Moonlight and La La Land, which was framed as a litmus test about race and the entertainment industry, ended in confusion and a reversal that emphasized the sense that they were locked in a zero-sum contest, and that for Moonlight to win, La La Land not merely had to lose, but to be defeated.

The truth is that both Moonlight and La La Land are highly moving, original works, and they went toe-to-toe during the ceremony, with Moonlight picking up three awards to La La Lands five. Both movies produced a winner of an acting award. Both Jenkins, 37, and La La Land director Damien Chazelle, 32, are young directors of tremendous vision who are going to compete for Academy Awards again, maybe even against each other.Lets hope the next time they do, they arent pitted against each other in a way that mirrors an ugly idea about racial progress that is ascendant in our politics: that the only way for members of one community to advance is at the expense of another. The Oscars ended in a painful way, but the wins Moonlight and La La Land racked up throughout the evening means well be getting outstanding movies from both Jenkins and Chazelle for years to come. Thats good for moviegoers, and good for America.

See the original post here:

The insane end of the Oscars sent a false message about racial progress - Washington Post