No one who has paid attention to the Academy Awards over the past 89 years has ever seen anything like “Moonlight’s” shocking, exhilarating, stomach-churning come-from-behind Oscar win on Sunday night — a victory that stunned the Dolby Theatre audience and viewers watching around the world.
In a rare year when everything went bizarrely haywire at the last minute, triggering memories of Steve Harvey’s 2015 Miss Universe flub, as well as flashbacks to the recent historic upset in the presidential election, one statistical trend held steady: Not since Hilary Swank won the Oscar for “Million Dollar Baby” in 2005 have the awards for lead actress and best picture gone to the same movie.
The stage had seemed set for Emma Stone to break the trend this year as the lead actress front-runner starring in the best picture favorite, “La La Land.” Though some had anticipated an upset win by Isabelle Huppert for “Elle,” Stone’s road to victory seemed clear. And indeed it was: She won the second-to-last prize of the night handily, and everyone assumed that her film would be honored next.
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Presenter Warren Beatty and host Jimmy Kimmel try to explain to the audience how the wrong envelope for best picture was read on stage during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26. In background are “Moonlight” writer/director Barry Jenkins, left and “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz embracing.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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Presenter Warren Beatty tries to explain to the audience how the wrong envelope for best picture was read onstage during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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“La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz holds up the winner card for best picture. His film had been read as the winner, but the actual winner was “Moonlight.”
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The audience at the Dolby Theatre is stunned after the best picture award is mistakenly announced as “La La Land” instead of “Moonlight” during the 89th Academy Awards.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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Presenter Warren Beatty and host Jimmy Kimmel try to explain to the audience how the wrong envelope for best picture was read onstage during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26. At right are “Moonlight” writer/director Barry Jenkins, left, and “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz embracing.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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Warren Beatty attempts to explain how “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the best picture winner instead of “Moonlight.” (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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“La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz, with Warren Beatty and host Jimmy Kimmel, after the mistaken annoucement that “La La Land” had won. “Moonlight” was the actual best picture winner.
(Kevin Winter / Getty Images)
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Fred Berger, foreground center, and the cast of “La La Land” mistakenly accept the award for best picture at the Oscars.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
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Accountants for Price Waterhouse Coopers take the correct envelope onto the stage after the best-picture mixup.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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Barry Jenkins holds up a best picture Oscar for “Moonlight.” (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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From left, “Moonlight” writer/director Barry Jenkins, and producers Adele Romanski and Jeremy Kleiner accept the Oscar for best picture during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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Janelle Monae reacts onstage after “Moonlight” won for best picture during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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“La La Land” producer Fred Berger, left, congratulates actor Mahershala Ali onstage after it was announced that “Moonlight” won for best picture.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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“Moonlight” actor Ashton Sanders is stunned after the movie won for best picture during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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“Moonlight” writer/director Barry Jenkins holds the Oscar for best picture during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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Mahershala Ali and Ryan Gosling backstage after it was announced that “Moonlight” won for best picture during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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“Moonlight” actors Andre Holland, left, and Ashton Sanders backstage during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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“Moonlight” actors Andre Holland, left, and Ashton Sanders backstage during the Academy Awards telecast on Feb. 26.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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Barry Jenkins, center, and the cast and crew of “Moonlight,” which won the Oscar for best picture.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
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Trevante Rhodes hugs Mahershala Ali after “Moonlight” was correctly identified as the winner of best picture.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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The cast and crew of “Moonlight” receives their best picture award after a chaotic mixup.
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Presenter Faye Dunaway backstage at the Academy Awards.
(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
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Ryan Gosling learns that his film, “La La Land,” did not win the best picture Oscar.
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Producer Ezra Edelman takes a photo of his statue as it is being engraved after winning for his documentary, “OJ: Made in America.”
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
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Presenters Michael J. Fox (left) and Seth Rogen (right) flank John Gilbert (center), who won a film editing Oscar for “Hacksaw Ridge.”
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Adam Valdez, Andrew R. Jones, Dan Lemmon and Robert Legato pose with their visual effects Oscars for “The Jungle Book.”
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Presenters Kate McKinnon (left) and Jason Bateman (right) flank Christopher Nelson, Giorgio Gregorian and Alessandro Bertolazzi, who won Oscars for makeup and hairstyling.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
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“La La Land” star Emma Stone on stage with Leonardo DiCaprio after she won the Oscar for lead actress.
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Casey Affleck after he won lead actor for “Manchester by the Sea” during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
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Damien Chazelle accepts the award for best director for “La La Land” from Halle Berry.
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Host Jimmy Kimmel tweets that “#Merylsayshi” at President Trump.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
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John Legend performs during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
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Surprised tourists brought to the Oscars chat with celebrities in the front row.
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Mahershala Ali, right, hands his Oscar to a tourist named Gary who was brought into the theater with others as a surprise.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
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Denzel Washington, center right, “marries” an engaged couple during a surprise visit of a Hollywood tour bus group during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
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Sting performs.
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Engineer and astronaut Anousheh Ansari, right, and former NASA scientist Firouz Naderi with the award for best foreign language film for “The Salesman.” They accepted on behalf of director Asghar Farhadi.
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
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Charlize Theron, left, and Shirley MacLaine.
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Mahershala Ali, left, and Viola Davis, winners for best supporting actor and actress.
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Viola Davis accepts the Oscar for supporting actress during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
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Viola Davis, winner of the award for best supporting actress, kisses Julius Tennon.
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Dwayne Johnson sings a bit of “You’re Welcome” from “Moana” during the Oscars telecast.
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Kevin O’Connell, left, and Andy Wright accept the award for best sound mixing for “Hacksaw Ridge.”
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
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Janelle Monae, Katherine Johnson, Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer.
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Lin-Manuel Miranda raps during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
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Auli’i Cravalho sings “How Far I’ll Go” from “Moana” during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
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Producer Caroline Waterlow and director Ezra Edelman, winners for best documentary feature.
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Mahershala Ali wins for best supporting actor.
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Alicia Vikander, left, presents Mahershala Ali with the award for best supporting actor.
(Chris Pizzello / Invision / Associated Press)
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Host Jimmy Kimmel
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Host Jimmy Kimmel
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Justin Timberlake performs to open the show.
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Justin Timberlake performs during the telecast of the 89th Academy Awards.
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Scarlett Johansson and date Joe Machota of CAA arrive at the 89th Academy Awards.
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Mayor Eric Garcetti makes an L.A. hand signal.
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Justin Timberalke and Jessica Biel arrive at the Oscars.
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Halle Berry on the red carpet.
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Sunny Pawar of “Lion” during the arrivals at the 89th Academy Awards.
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Chef Wolfgang Puck presents Oscars cuisine during the arrivals at the 89th Academy Awards.
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Chrissy Teigen and John Legend.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
But then “Moonlight,” despite having lost the reliably predictive Producers and Directors Guild awards to “La La Land,” pulled through with the win — not at the last minute, but after the last minute, after “La La Land” had already been announced as the winner. And to witness the barrage of confusing reports on what went wrong on stage, it was, ironically, Stone’s category that seemed to have tripped up the proceedings. It was a duplicate of her best actress envelope that wound up in the hands of best picture presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
There are several possible takeaways from all this confusion, not least the fact that Barry Jenkins’ film, despite the unfortunate circumstances of its moment in the spotlight, strikes me as the single most deserving best picture Oscar winner since “The Hurt Locker” and possibly “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
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Of course, “Moonlight” offers us a radically different vision of masculinity than those two films. A gay love story of bruising tenderness and psychological intimacy, “Moonlight” stands at a decisive remove from the kinds of movies that the academy has until now been fairly comfortable rewarding.
That’s why the film’s big win feels so culturally and statistically improbable; Even without the on-stage mix-up, it would have been a shocker for the history books. And amid all the necessary talk about improving diversity in front of and behind the camera, its triumph stands as a rebuke to the perception problem that the motion picture academy has often faced in terms of which films — and by extension, which genders, races and sexual orientations — are deemed significant enough for its highest honor.
Movies about straight white men, including “The King’s Speech,” “The Social Network,” “Lincoln” and “The Revenant,” don’t usually have to work hard to be taken seriously; their dramatic significance and mainstream appeal are assumed from the get-go.
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To be fair, there have recently been several female-centric films that fulfilled the same requirements and were duly recognized for it. Brie Larson won the actress Oscar last year for “Room,” an intimate and emotional two-hander that was also nominated for best picture and director. Natalie Portman won for carrying the multi-Oscar-nominated “Black Swan,” while Sandra Bullock took the prize for one best picture nominee (“The Blind Side”) and was nominated for another (“Gravity”).
Viola Davis backstage after winning the Oscar for supporting actress for ‘Fences’ at the 89th Academy Awards.
But for the most part, these feel like the exceptions that prove an unfortunate rule. Not for nothing did Cate Blanchett, accepting her Oscar for “Blue Jasmine” three years ago, rebuke “the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences.” That idea still persists. Unlike their male-dominated counterparts, films like “Blue Jasmine,” “The Iron Lady” and “Still Alice,” to name a few recent lead-actress Oscar winners, are still largely treated as specialty items. They seem to have been conceived as showcases for their leading ladies’ technical brilliance, rather than as great movies in their own right.
Stone’s work in “La La Land” is different. She and Gosling drew plenty of criticism for their less-than-Juilliard-worthy singing and dancing, but the worth of Stone’s performance isn’t predicated on musical prowess alone. Her strengths as a performer — her sharp comic instincts and emotional sincerity, that piercing sense that the camera is seeing straight through to her soul — dovetail with the film’s own melancholy virtues. She isn’t at odds with the material; she’s beautifully in sync with it.
That Stone won for “La La Land” and Gosling didn’t is entirely fitting; this is very much her movie, and its most affecting moments belong to her. And that highlights still another phenomenon at work here, one that is actually cause for optimism: 2016 was an exceptional, fiercely competitive year for female leads, and a relatively middling one for male leads.
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Had the academy somehow not nominated Stone, Huppert, Ruth Negga, Portman and Meryl Streep for lead actress, they could have still served up a terrific lineup with, say, Amy Adams, Annette Bening, Rebecca Hall, Jessica Chastain, Taraji P. Henson and many others.
There’s also the much-discussed fact that Viola Davis, the supporting actress winner on Sunday night for “Fences,” was submitted in that less competitive race despite playing a leading role (and she has a lead-actress Tony for “Fences” to prove it). Had Davis, a three-time nominee, been campaigned as a lead, her shattering turn would almost certainly have been a threat to win — and, I suspect, she would have ultimately done so, beating out Stone in the process.
The thorny, difficult, overbearing and extremely necessary discussion around the Oscars and diversity will continue, and I hope the day the academy gives best picture to a female-led film is not far away. But Sunday night’s history-making flub aside, there should be no regret on the members’ behalf for awarding their top prize to “Moonlight,” the most artistically accomplished and politically resonant of the nine films nominated.
“Moonlight” doesn’t re-entrench conventional notions about masculinity; it subverts them entirely. It’s only the second film from a black director to win best picture, after “12 Years a Slave” (2013) — and it will do even more than that earlier groundbreaking film to explode the industry’s ideas of what kinds of black stories deserve to be told, and which ones deserve to win industry prizes.
Writing about both “La La Land” and “Moonlight” a week ago, I noted that “in the spirit of a less hostile, less Trumpian awards season, I’d suggest that these two fine movies, far from being natural adversaries, are in fact worthy companion pieces.”
None of us who were watching realized exactly how true that would be — how inextricable these two movies’ fortunes would be, up until the thrilling, devastating, you-couldn’t-have-scripted-it finale.
Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.
