How 'Moonlight' pulled off the Oscar upset of a lifetime....
"There's something in the way black men grow up in this country," said Jenkins. "There's a lot of information on these men's faces when they're not speaking, partly because we're robbed of our voices so much by society and the things society projects on us."
It was, in a way, fitting that "Moonlight" - stealthy and silent - won best picture amid such cacophony Sunday night. Since its fall film festival debut, Jenkin's tenderly lyrical film has steadily risen not through the loud kind of arm-waving that often catapults movies to the top prize - big box office, scene-chewing performances, historical sweep - but instead by a soulful, unremitting glow that slow-burned all the way to the Oscars.
Now that we more or less have some answers to "What the heck happened?" in the Oscars' final moments - EnvelopeGate, if you will - we can turn to that other puzzler: How did "Moonlight" just pull off one of the biggest upsets in Academy Awards history?
While not quite as gasp-inducing as the gaff that preceded its win, "Moonlight" will surely rank alongside, if not above, shockers like "Shakespeare in Love" (over "Saving Private Ryan") and "Crash" (over "Brokeback Mountain") for sheer, oh-my-god surprise.
The odds were stacked against it. "La La Land," with a record-tying 14 nominations, was seen as the hands-down favorite, having run up prizes from the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes. Though this usually hapless critic predicted a "Moonlight" win , virtually every Oscar prognosticator considered "La La Land" - like Hillory clinton it turned out- a lock.
But just as Clinton learned, there are dangers to being the presumed front-runner, especially when you're seen as a representative of nostalgia and tradition in turbulent times.
Widely expected to honor itself again by awarding a showbiz celebration like "La La Land," Hollywood veered instead to Miami's Liberty City, and a film that ripples with the humanity of a young man - black, gay, poor - seldom dignified by the movies or other realms of society. Yet "Moonlight" isn't a traditional social drama but a deeply personal one, soaked through with the kind of empathy many believe is missing from the national discourse. In the wake of the election of Donald Trump - surely a factor on Oscar night - Hollywood chose not a love letter to itself, but, as filmmaker Mark Duplass argued in an open-letter to academy voters , a "love letter to the core human values that connect us all."
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