road moonlightThe film’s “Best Picture” win at the Oscars may have been strange and shocking, but it knocked out the expected favorite La la landBarry Jenkins’ film set a number of milestones. It is the lowest budget film to win the award since Delbert Mann Marty In 1955; Adjusted for inflation, it is the lowest ever. It is the first film centered around an LGBTQ character to win Best Picture, and the first to have an entirely cast of people of color. Beyond that, it’s so unbelievable moonlight Defeated La la land Simply because the latter felt like a film aimed at Academy voters — an original, well-made musical about art and Hollywood dreams, shot with nostalgia for the industry’s golden age.
But maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising moonlight I took the best photo. It’s a stunning film, but in some ways it also fits the mold the Academy has been leaning towards in recent years. For decades, it was unusual for the film with the most awards that night to lose the Best Picture race. But in recent years, this has become the norm. For decades, splits between Best Picture and Best Director (as occurred at last night’s Oscars) have been relatively rare; In the last 20 years, this has happened 8 times. moonlight It’s a unique film, one that tells the kind of story that the Oscars have largely ignored throughout its history — but it’s also the kind of smaller, more intimate tale that voters are starting to enjoy.
moonlight It won three Oscars this year: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali), and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney. Winner of Best Picture last year Highlight He received only two awards, and in 2015, Birdman He won four. The year before that, 12 years of slavery He won three as he did Argo in 2013. In each case, there was another, more lavish production that won at least the same number of awards, if not more: The return, Grand Budapest Hotel, attractivenessand Life of Pirespectively (with all except Budapest Winning Best Director but not Best Picture.) La la land It seems to belong to this new norm of ticket-splitting, where voters score a bunch of artistic wins for the front-runner, but award Best Picture to smaller, critically-acclaimed productions.
Again, this is not deductible moonlightA game-changing victory. Although movies like Highlight and Birdman They were independent works, produced on a much larger budget and distributed by the more established independent wings of the major studios (moonlightHe was the distributor for A24 It was founded only five years ago (which quickly became one of the most respected names in American art cinema). However, only one major studio has won Best Picture in the past decade: Warner Bros Argo and The departed). As major Hollywood production companies move away from prestige films to focus more on big franchises, the list of Best Picture nominations is mostly filled with independent and “major mid-range” companies (with streaming service Amazon achieving its own milestone this year for Manchester by sea).
If things are really heading in that direction, then moonlight It may be the beginning of a more radical change. Of the nine films nominated for this year’s Best Picture award, it is the lowest grossing (it has grossed $22 million in the four months since its release, behind the next lowest film). Hell or high water (in the amount of $27 million). The Oscars held a certain reverence for well-reviewed films that broke out in a big way. This is how consensus options are similar Beautiful mind, Gladiator, brave heart, and forrest gump He received the award for more famous films. La la land It fits this mold well – but maybe that mold is broken.
That helps moonlight It was universally heralded, garnering the kind of enthusiastic critical raves that come along once-in-a-generation, not once-a-year. It was also a beautifully made film on all levels, attracting support from a wide range of Academy branches (it was nominated for its music, cinematography, and editing alongside the expected nods in writing, acting, and direction). This is crucial to winning Best Picture, because people from each branch of the Academy can vote on the winners, which is what has prevented smaller, less technically impressive independent films from winning in the past. Maybe next year the trophy will go to a big epic that hits the box office, like Christopher Nolan’s epic Dunkirkand this last pattern will be turned upside down. either way, moonlight‘s win is shocking enough to be remembered forever. The thing to watch now is whether this is a magical anomaly at the Oscars, or a sign of profound change at the Academy.