The best picture win for Moonlight turned out to be a literal takeaway for both LaLa Land and the Hollywood establishment. But not all takeaways are created equally.
In the first case, the “Hollywood ending” quips are totally called for. After a clearly confused Warren Beatty looked vainly inside the wrong envelope for the right announcement, his co-presenter, Faye Dunaway, announced LaLa Land as the winner of the Best Picture award. Except it wasn’t. It was Moonlight, in a moment so stunning that even the graphic designers managed to get in their critiques – design a readable card! – before the conspiracy theorists recovered enough to weigh in.
No matter what is going on in your life, I expect you will be having a better day than the people who were associated with the chain of custody of that last, all-important envelope.
Some three LaLa Land producers had managed to get through their acceptance speeches before they were finally told the news. And in a moment of extraordinary grace, it was LaLa Land producer Jordan Horowitz who snatched the correct card from Beatty and showed it to the audience declaring, “This is not a joke. Moonlight has won Best Picture.”
And with that, a moment of triumph and celebration was engulfed by confusion and disbelief, as two separate but equally hard-working film families struggled to process the news. A clean win would have meant so much. “I didn’t want to go up there and take anything from somebody, you know?” Mahershala Ali told The New York Times. At least it wasn’t the other way around, black Twitter whispered, a nod to a controversy that would never, ever have died.
But without belaboring a difficult moment, there’s a deeper poignancy in the scene. For the past two years, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag and related online social pressure have forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to diversify its leadership and voting base, ruffling the feathers of some longstanding members, many of whom hadn’t made any part of a movie for decades. As a result, new filmmakers, stories, themes, and talent were being acknowledged in a ceremony that had been routinely criticized for rewarding insiders instead of excellence, a liberal Hollywood that turned out not to be so liberal after all.
While there were plenty of mainstream political moments , it was hard to deny how different the ceremony felt and looked.
Six black actors were nominated, all deserving. The two who won – first-timer Mahershala Ali and longtime favorite Viola Davis – both moved the crowd to tears with their extraordinary acceptance speeches. Three films with predominantly black casts, “Fences,” “Moonlight,” and “Hidden Figures,” were nominated for Best Picture, with nary a slave or a maid in sight. Four out of five entries in the documentary category were created by artists of color. The winner for the best documentary short film was The White Helmets, a film about the extraordinary Syrian civil defense unit that conducts civilian rescue operations in war-torn Syria. In an ironic twist, their cinematographer was blocked by the Department Homeland Security from entering the country to attend the ceremony.
I can’t blame anyone who said, “Enough of politics!” and turned the channel, as so many on social feeds claimed to do. But you don’t have to watch the Oscars or annoying celebrities speak in their own voices to reap the benefits of a diverse Hollywood. You just have to live in the real world that they are helping to shape: One in which disciplined creators get to tell big, humane and unexpected stories that change the way we see ourselves and each other.
I expect there will continue to be some confusing moments as the Hollywood old guard figures out how to make room on stage for unfamiliar others, the very newcomers who are unfailingly making the business case for diversity in film.
But the only thing that’s truly being lost are the opportunity costs associated with seeing the world in a narrow way. And that’s the kind of takeaway we should all be able to live with.