A Dramatic End to the Cinematic Award Season

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Features

Published on Saturday, 04 March 2017 15:14

Written by Brad Balfour

End of the month and end of this awards season. The Oscars and Indie Spirit Awards consumed cinematic consciousness — all dovetailing into last weekend’s monumental fuck-up for the ages. During the Feb. 26th ceremony on ABC, actors Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who were set to present the Best Picture category, were accidentally given the wrong envelope — it was a duplicate of the one listing Emma Stone as Best Actress for the musical “La La Land” rather than the one for “Moonlight” as Best Picture. A confused Warren passed it on to Faye, who announced “LaLa Land” as the winner. 

Wrong! While the gaggle of producers, cast and creators of the film started their thanks, an Academy person hustled onto the stage to say, “Oops, it was really ‘Moonlight.’”

Certainly it wasn’t planned this way but it offered a sort of a philosophical/metaphorical twist to a contest that pitted a small film hitting several bugaboos with a bigger film which also addressed some bugaboos. But in this case the politically-charged progressive challenger won — against the odds.

Maybe it wasn’t quite the surprise that the presidential election turned out to be but it certainly packed a wallop. It will certainly mean that the accounting firm PwC partner Brian Cullinan and his associate will never get backstage at the Oscars ever again. And it will make this year’s low ratings not so insufferable because everybody’s has now been talking Oscars afterwards.

Youthful director Damien Chazelle’s “LaLa Land” had gotten enough props winning various awards and landing on about 20 Best Of critics’ group lists. But it just wasn’t that good a musical, let alone that great a film. 

Okay, so the darn song “City of Stars” did stick in my head — and frankly did deserve its win for Best Song — but dammit, actors Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone didn’t rock my world, and just weren’t that great as dancers or singers. As the end-all and be-all of films this year, it’s a sad statement as the one getting all those accolades. Nonetheless, Chazelle got his directing win and so did Emma Stone for Best Actress (and okay, neither of those scores being so annoying).

Though “LaLa Land” is a nice movie with a treacly storyline saved by an unexpected ending, it does more damage than good by being a perfect anesthetic in this age of Trump. It’s a conservatively-styled film that does what it does safely. So very vanilla. More importantly, it didn’t make me feel any sorrow for these silly white people as they have their faux drama about trying to make their art “authentically” — especially when it came to Gosling’s character as jazz’s true savior versus John Legend’s pop music, C’mon. There was nothing authentic about this and their paucity of singing and dancing skills made the inauthenticity even more telling.

Having now dismissed that film for getting so much attention — I might have been less severe had it not gotten such inordinate praise — this Oscar season was so important for the films up there that did matter. Take for example, “Moonlight.” As ghetto gangs get demonized ever more by Trumpian tirades, this film humanizes and, even moreso, details the depth of the complex, emotional lives of the inhabitants of one such ghettoized housing project in Miami, Florida. Telling it through a tryptich of young Chiron’s coming of age — as both a gang survivor and gay man on the down low — Barry Jenkins’s film of the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell Alvin McCraney decidedly deserved its win for Best Adapted Screenplay as well.

“Moonlight” was the Indie Spirit Awards’ big scorer Saturday, and pulled in Oscar wins as well with Mahershala Ali taking home the award for Best Supporting Actor. But its biggest win is that it joined a raft of films which not only broke the color barrier but did so solely on merit. “Hidden Figures,” “Fences,” and even “Lion” told real tales of people with mixed ethnicities as if to point them out even moreso at a time when insightful or inspiring stories counterbalance dark political jabs.

What’s incredible about the doc picks is that three of them — “O. J. : Made in America,” “13th” and “I Am Not Your Negro” — are profound political indictments about how mainstream America has treated its people of color; and “Weiner” is an indictment of celebrity culture and politics; only “Gleason” is a simply life-affirming film.

And even in the Short Docs category — including winner “White Helmets” — addressed the crisis in Syria like never before.

So this proves that people out there looking at screens, either in the theaters or in their hands, can still find that most of this year’s award choices offer some truly interesting and satisfying stuff.

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