Yup. Among the best movies in recent memory, and certainly one of the few times the best movie actually won. The last winner at this level of quality was probably No Country, which is funny because as deserving a BP as that film is There Will Be Blood was arguably the best movie of the last 20 years.
How does a film win Best Picture and not Best Director? Giving awards to producers seems like a pretty overt admission that marketing is more important than art for them. As others have said, one of the best winners in years. The first good film since No Country for Old Men.
"Imagine it: the Academy Awards have already gone beyond its stated end time, meaning that everyone still watching wants to go to bed. Then, the biggest award of the night goes to La La Land, and their victory lap begins. By the time the Moonlight team realized that that moment was supposed to be theirs, they had to shove a befuddled speech in among the chuckles and good-natured apologies of their colleagues. And the content of the speech will barely matter at all, because tomorrow no one's going to be talking about it because instead they'll be talking about how badly the Oscars screwed things up." Yep, already true.
Jenkins has shown previously his respect and deference to the canon. It is exciting to think of the possibility that there will be a well-known director with these kinds of influences, especially one that has shown in both of his films how well he can convey the black experience as well as more narrow subsections of that (fitting in as a black person in gentrified San Francisco, homosexuality in the black community). Luckily this success means we will not have to wait eight years between films again.
‘Moonlight’ to Stream on Amazon Prime Video Exclusively Under A24 Renewal Looks like all a24 movies are prime exclusive