If you have been reading my Oscar Review specials, you would know that although I liked La la land I didnt believe it should win Best Picture and that honour should go to either The Arrival, Fences or Moonlight. Moonlight came up on top and I'm happy. Let's dig in on why Moonlight was a deserving winner...
In the age of the Donald, fake news has entered the general public's lexicon, intolerance is brewing, LGBTI are targeted in public bathrooms, Mexicans and Muslim people and folks who are not generally Caucasian and "Christian" are not so welcomed in the US no more.
Of course in these times, the dream machine that used to pride itself on producing dramas that spoke to the times and captured the outlooks of generations from The Godfather to Rebel Without a Cause to even Rocky would give the Best Picture to a movie that is very anti-Trump.
So as to sock it to the powers that be and show that even though money runs Hollywood, money loves liberal ideals more than ideas that are more in line with Stalin times than 2017. So that's reason one why Moonlight got that golden statue.
Then there's the story of Moonlight - if black males are trash, black males are "hard criminals", black males are a walking stereotype, a caricature at most and Barry Jenkins and writer / collaborator Tarell Alvin McCraney take the stereotypes of the black male and turns them on their head.
Instead we get fully fledged characters who go up against the stereotype from Mahershala Ali's drug pushing Juan, who is a decent father figure with a very bad job, to the various incarnations of Chiron.
It helps that Barry Jenkins and Tarelll McCraney (whose unpublished play the movie is based on) can call on their own experiences of growing up with a drug addict mother in the streets of Miami.
We can see it in how the people are portrayed, humanised and questioned. No one is made out to be a saint, they are just people with faults.
We have the troubled inner city child, the angry black woman, the thug young adult and each are given a sense of humanity, sensitivity that they become more than just stereotype. Naomi Harris, who could have ended up as another stereotyped druggie, is given some complexity and she rises to the challenge.
Even though the main character is gay, the film is not framed to be about gay rights but about a journey of self discovery. Mind you, even within the black community here in the SA and in the USA, LGBTI are portrayed for laughs in movies, they are never totally real characters.
Folks that one can identify with or where you get a sense that they are more than just tension release devices or jokes. Barry Jenkins pushes all to the side and turns Moonlight into this year's Boyhood with a character who is gay.
Barry Jenkins takes us into the world of the young man growing up gay in the urban jungle and you have to be Stalin not to be moved by the coming of age story that does not rely on big dramatic moments, shouty acting or hyper dramatic moments to tell a story about a man who is coming to terms with himself.
He could easily fit in but he's looking to find a connection that would let him be himself and you don't have to be gay to get that.
It's a simple story told with heart and it got me sold - I would have loved The Arrival to win but it losing out to a movie with an entirely black cast, written by black guys, directed by a black male in a time where last year people where crying #Oscarssowhite is legendary.
Barry Jenkins became the first African American director to win a Best Picture, it's the first LGBTI film to win Best Picture ever and the first movie with a micro budget of $1.5 m to win Best Picture. These are massive achievements.
I have a feeling 10 years from now we will be talking about how this movie paved the way to showing black people in their different shades of grey and not just how the announcement was bundled.
Rating
*****
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* Pap * * It needs a lot of aromat *** we are cooking with gas ****book your ticket ***** Buy this,its a classic