The Testaverde Touchdown of Best Pictures

Art is subjective.  And voting has a great deal of popularity ingrained in the process.  So when it comes to picking a winner for Best Picture, there have been times where people have scratched their heads wondering how did this movie win.  The most recent was Argo from a few years ago.  This post will be about Moonlight, but first let's take a stroll down memory lane so that you can understand the title of this post.

Now that I think about it, that wasn't a very cheerful memory.  So last year in my post about the annual contest the wife and I have, I presented my version of how I would have handled the situation at the end of the Oscars.  Remember you were dealing with two people not very smart.  Especially Warren Beatty who is dumb enough for both of them.  He remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan and called it Heaven Can Wait, a completely different movie.  That would be the same as remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark and calling it Apocalypse Now.

The film is a good movie, although somewhat confusing at times.  It is broken into three parts, each one is its own entity as if it were three different short films.  The first segment shows the main character, Chiron as a child being bullied by the other kids and his mother is a drug addict.  A drug dealer, Juan played by Mahershala Ali, takes a liking to Chiron and acts like a father figure to him.  The second segment shows Chiron as a teenager still being bullied.  He has a sexual encounter with one his male classmates who ends up beating him up later on after being egged on by a bully.  Chiron retaliates against the bully and is sent to jail.  The third segment shows Chiron now an adult, is a drug dealer, and seeks out his friend he had the encounter with years earlier.

This is not a bad movie, the first part is terrific.  Mahershala Ali is amazing in every scene he is in, he carries the film and is so talented.  He clearly earned the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.  But he is only in the first part of the film, once he is gone the film is not really worth watching.  Naomie Harris who plays Chiron's mother, also does a great job and received a Supporting Actress nomination, but is not enough to carry the film after Mahershala Ali's character dies.

It received notoriety because the relationship involved two boys.  Just like Brokeback Mountain, if you replaced the two male characters with a male and female, would it still be considered as good as a film?  If the answer is yes, then it is a good story.  If no, then the film is not an Oscar caliber film.  In the case of Moonlight, I think this falls into the same situation.  It is a good film, but if the romantic interest of Chiron was a woman, I don't think it would be as well known.

That being said, it did win Best Picture and there was the big fiasco at the Oscars with Warren Beatty who is as dumb as soap.  But on a positive note, at least La La Land didn't win after all.  So Lion is still the best of the year, Hidden Figures second, Moonlight third and La La Land quickly moving towards ninth place but stopping at fourth for now.