The year was 2016. The Oscar ceremony had already awarded statuettes to Viola Davis for Fences, screenplay awards to Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight as did the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in a similar order. Best Director and Actress was awarded to La La Land, not to mention other strong nominees that year in Lion and the fan favorite Hidden Figures. It was a rich year for movies considering the previous year had had lots of very good movies but nothing that would be considered great. So when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway stepped to the stage to announce the Best Picture, it was anyone's guess. Or was it?
A betting person would have had terrible odds for choosing La La Land because it seemed like such a sure thing. It had all the elements of an Oscar winning film.
It celebrated Hollywood - those bloated egomaniacs always love films lauding how great that town is.
It had Oscar nominated performances by two of the most charming people on the planet - Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone had already been in two films together, Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Gangster Squad, and their chemistry was electric. They beckoned back to the hey dey of Hollywood when people actually liked the stars that made movies.
People saw it - it made nearly half a billion dollars.
It was a musical - at once point, musicals used to dominate the Academy Awards as evidenced in the 1960s when for four years a musical was adorned with the Best Picture title.
People were so convinced La La Land was going to win that when Faye Dunaway stepped to the microphone, she announced to the surprise of no one that it had won Best Picture. The producers and talent of that film stormed the stage and began celebrating the win, only to be told there had been an error. It had actually been Moonlight that had been voted by the Motion Picture Academy. A mistake had been made.
And I couldn't have agreed more. Only the mistake was in correcting the original mistake. La La Land was hands down the Best Picture in 2016 and quite frankly, is the best film I have seen in the last 20 years. I don't throw around the word magical very often with movies. The only films that have gained that moniker in my eyes are Field of Dreams (which also got robbed as best film, just ask John Mulaney), Casablanca, and The Godfather. These are things that like Taylor Swift songs, make you feel things you didn't expect to feel. After viewing these films they don't just stay with you for days or even months. You are thinking about them for years. And when you rewatch those films, the magic hasn't lessened any and sometimes there is even more of it. La La Land is one of those films.
From the opening number that takes place on a highway with hundreds of extras to the sweet duet and dance between Gosling and Stone as the sun goes down, this film is full of great songs and tells a great story with great characters. You think this is just another sappy love story but this is a real love story with all the bumps and bruises and casualties that come from them. And it doesn't end like you think it will. Trust me.
I don't mean to take anything away from Moonlight, but it is not a film that stays with you. In fact, I forgot most of it a week after I saw it. I think Mahershala Ali is a spectacular actor but I did not see what was so special about his award winning performance in this film. Dev Patel from Lion gave a much more memorable performance in the supporting category. Barry Jenkins is no doubt a talented filmmaker, but the story seemed very basic and disjointed.
Those last 10 minutes of La La Land when we see the life that could have been for Gosling and Stone's characters, my heart sings and I cannot walk away without tears in my eyes and regret in my soul. Every person I have hyped this film to has walked away a believer including my skeptical 12 year-old daughter who now counts it as one of her very favorites.
When we are watching La La Land 50 years from now like we watch other classics such as The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story, we will be lucky to be able to find Moonlight on whatever format of film we have at that time.
How big a mistake do I think the Oscars made? Before 2016 I had made it a habit to watch every Best Picture nominee (even when they expanded to 10 films). I spent my November through February going to movie theatres tracking down the films that showcased the Oscar nominated performances and screenplays as well. Oscar night was like Super Bowl Sunday for me. I would invite family and friends, we would fill out ballots, and prizes would be awarded for the person who got the most right (which was always me by the way).
And yet after this major gaffe, I stopped trying to see the best films and performances. I was lucky if I saw two or three of them. I had seen every Best Picture since 1951 but have not seen three of the last seven winners. Heck, there were even years I didn't even watch the ceremony. I missed the infamous Will Smith slap because I was sitting out that year.
The magic of the Oscars kind of died for me when La La Land didn't win. Even the magic of films have died for me as I have not seen a film since then that I would consider to be a classic film that will be seen by others years from now. Now that popcorn fare has taken over it is going to be more and more difficult for us to see a film like La La Land, while you might see a dozen Moonlight-like films on Netflix this year alone. Streaming services can afford to take chances on small films that cost a couple of million to produce. They cannot however take big swings and misses. La La Land's don't come cheap and as evidenced by Chazelle's follow-up Babylon which tanked, studios are going to be less and less likely to try movies like this unless there is an intellectual property or major name attached to it.