(Taken from Chocolate Films)
Moonlight won the best picture Oscar for 2017. No one in their right mind who has seen the film can be mad at that. Whilst it wasn’t my favourite film of the year (hello, Hidden Figures), I believe that it was the most important out of the bunch.
What did bother me was how quickly the La La Land hate train gathered pace. My timeline after the Oscar’s Steve Harvey moment was like the O.J Simpson verdict 2.0.
For reasons I can fully understand given the history of the Academy ignoring fantastic black movies and actors (they should be ashamed of how they did Spike Lee’s Malcom X biopic, but that is for a different time), the battle between La La Land and Moonlight became a race war. And it really shouldn’t have come close to being the case.
This was one hell of a year for films. Damn near every nomination had a legitimate argument for winning the best picture award and if it had been La La Land, that would have been fine – that isn’t reason enough for bringing race into it (and I’m not a stranger to using my god given Trump card).
Stuff like this scares me because I suspect we will be needing as many race cards as possible in the near future (we’ve got to survive Brexit and a Trump presidency) and using them for bullshit cases such as this – an Oscar season where there was a bevy of fantastic films – will dilute the impact of those cards when real injustices happen.
This was simply a case of a dope film about gay black folks, being better than a class of other dope films. Let’s leave it at that.
Just a normal everyday bloke writing about films.