Moonlight bags the best picture after an astonishing flub in which La La Land was initially named the winner.
by Al Jazeera
The coming-of-age drama, Moonlight, has won the Academy Award for best picture, in an extraordinary Oscar upset and an unprecedented gaffe that saw one winner swapped for another.
While announcing the top honour of Sunday’s event, an apparent mix-up of cards created uproar and confusion in which presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty initially declared smash hit musical, La La Land, the winner.
But as La La Land’s producers were accepting the award, they were interrupted for a highly unusual correction: La La Land was not the winner, Moonlight was.
A chagrined Beatty blamed the flub on the envelope, which he said had contained a duplicate of the card for the best actress trophy.
“I opened the envelope and it said Emma Stone, La La Land,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
Host Jimmy Kimmel had come forward to inform the cast that Moonlight had indeed won, showing the inside of the envelope as proof. “I knew I would screw this up,” said Kimmel, a first-time host.
“I promise to never come back.”
Producer Jordan Horwitz then graciously passed his statue to the Moonlight producers.
Al Jazeera’s Andy Gallacher, reporting from Los Angeles, said there was a complete chaos after the error and people were confused.
“This was not exactly the Hollywood ending,” he said.
“As the La La Land crew got on stage to receive the award, one of the members of the La La Land put up the card to the camera and said this is not a joke, Moonlight won.”
“The mistake has overshadowed the entire awards night. Now the only thing people will remember is this monumental mistake, which was … great news for Moonlight and bad news for La La Land,” Gallacher said.
The best picture award was the third Oscar for Barry Jenkins’ film about an African American boy growing up gay in a poor neighbourhood in Miami.
Moonlight also won best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali – the first Muslim actor ever to win the Oscar – and best adapted screenplay for Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney.
The film has won plaudits as a vital portrait of contemporary African American life and is praised in equal measure as a groundbreaking and personal meditation on identity, family, friendship and love.
My motto for the rest of 2017: #Oscars pic.twitter.com/0JVzsVE7rO
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Besides La La Land, Moonlight beat seven other films, including alien thriller Arrival and family dramas Manchester by the Sea and Fences for best picture honours.
La La Land, however, still collected a leading six awards, including honours for cinematography, production design, score, the song “City of Stars” and best director for Damien Chazelle, who at 32 became the youngest ever filmmaker to win the category.
La La Land star Emma Stone also won best actress for her portrayal of an aspiring actress forced to endure the indignities of failed auditions, while Manchester by the Sea star Casey Affleck was named best actor for his performance as a taciturn janitor with a troubled past.
“Man, I wish I had something better and more meaningful to say … I’m just dumbfounded that I’m included,” said Affleck, a first-time Oscar winner.
Viola Davis, meanwhile, won her first Oscar for her supporting roles in Fences. The wins of Davis and Ali marked the first time in more than a decade that multiple Oscar acting honours went to black actors.
Poking fun at Trump
Earlier in the show, US President Trump had been the target of numerous jokes, capping an awards season marked by fiery protests by celebrities at his policies.
Kimmel fired off political zingers and even tweeted at the Republican president, getting no immediate response.
Insisting he was at a loss for words to help unite a divided country, the host exhorted viewers to make their own efforts at reconciliation by reaching out to political adversaries they knew personally to “have a positive, considerate conversation, not as liberals or conservatives, as Americans.”
“If we could all do that, we could make America great again,” he said, an allusion to Trump’s own campaign slogan.
Kimmel also showed a willingness to tweak the motion picture academy for its own shortcomings, drawing a sly parallel between the criticism both the president and the Oscars have taken for a perceived lack of racial sensitivity.
“I want to say, ‘Thank you, President Trump,'” he said. “I mean, remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist ?” he asked rhetorically in a reference to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that clouded the Academy Awards in 2016.
Several celebrities wore blue ribbons on Sunday in support of the American Civil Liberties Union advocacy group that worked to get Trump’s bid to ban travellers from seven majority Muslim nations blocked in US courts.
But for the most part, speeches at the ceremony were mild or made general pleas for tolerance rather than directly attacking Trump.
