Okay, obviously the last category got fucked up!
But how about the rest? I'll start with Best Picture. This year I didn't see all of the contenders, just caught 3 of the 5 IIRC. So I can't speak to Moonlight. It didn't interest me so I never saw it but I guess the Academy must have liked it. Of the ones I did see
La La Land impressed me the most. I suspect that it will attain true classic status in a fairly short amount of time and will still be well loved thirty years from now. Emma Stone's Oscar for Best Actress was well deserved IMO although I think she was perhaps even better in
Birdman. Of course the flip side is that Amy Adams probably deserved it just as much; this is maybe the third time she lost what must have been a pretty close contest.
Arrival was a strange film on a lot of levels but I felt is was superb.
I didn't see the performance that earned Best Actor. My only knowledge of him was from
Luke Cage where he plays "Cottonmouth", a gangster and foe of Luke Cage. He's simply dreadful in that show, painful to watch, but to be fair it could be the way the part is written.
Fences didn't look very interesting either so I never found time to see it. Washington has been superb in everything I've seen but I have never understood the appeal of Viola Davis. She's certainly competent but nothing she's ever done has blown me away. Since I haven't seen the film I can't really say much about her Oscar, presumably the performance must have been Oscar-worthy. I will say that Michelle William's performance was a masterpiece, totally devastating. It's a shame it didn't get the award (with respects to Davis). Casey Affleck has seemed solid in the past but here he really shined- his award was well deserved IMO.
Somehow I think
Hell or High Water got "ripped off" on some level. Maybe it was too quiet or the politics too subtle but I feel that had it won Best Picture no one could have been surprised. I have an odd hunch that after last year's debacle the Academy bent over backwards to make sure the optics and the politics were correct, and that the actual work didn't enter into the awards as much as one would have hoped. I once heard a suggestion made that the films should be reexamined in five years to see if they should still keep the award. That may have been made facetiously but there's maybe some merit in the idea. Many Oscar awards now look head scratching in hindsight. It will be interesting to see how this year's awards look in five or ten years.
