The path of Moonlight has been a great one to watch. At first it was making the rounds in arthouse theaters, then some smaller venues in big cities, and then its momentum just kept carrying it along until it seemed to be getting buzz from just about everyone. Well, now we’re creeping into awards season, and that buzz has done its job: Moonlight was just named best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
It’s been a better year for diversity in awards shows than years past; along with Moonlight‘s director Barry Jenkins, numerous other women and people of color won awards. That includes the makers of Certain Women, Toni Erdmann, and The Illinois Parables, all of which had female directors. And I am not Your Negro won best documentary, along with Your Name from Japan for best animated feature.
Related: 5 Reasons Moonlight Might Just Be The Best Movie Of The Year
The LA Film Critics Association awards will all be formally handed out in mid-January, though generally only other other film critics will be aware of them.
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Hopefully when we get to the awards show that more people really tune into, Moonlight will have racked up even more attention. It’s really a lovely piece of work, from the performances to the challenging portrayal of masculinity to Janelle Monae‘s cannot-look-away command of the screen.
davidjohng
Such a moving, engaging film! The main character played out all the levels of his sad character and the film gave us a new view of black masculinity that exists in reality but is rarely shown in film. Ground breaking.
Scribe38
So much of this film hit home with me. I wish it ended a little different, but yeah I think it’s an honest picture of what some gay black males go through growing up. More than once I thought, yeah that shit happen to me.
ErikO
Is it any good? Or is it full of r@c!$t black stereotypes?
Frank
@ErikO: Moonlight is a visual meditation that compels us to consider the everyday violence(s) that Chiron navigates and negotiates throughout his life. The film lays bare the corrupting and contaminating terrain of masculinity — its toxicities, its brutalities, its unrelenting banality. It certainly isn’t a love story. It’s a story of robbed innocence, of a trepid, almost smashed adolescence, of a barren adult life. In a world that would otherwise see a boy like [Chiron] disappear, he becomes a man that insists on carving out a life for himself. Your heart will stutter. Your spirit will be moved.
Frank
@ErikO:
I took away from Moonlight was just how much I understood the main characters’ choices. I mentioned that while I did not perform quite the same way as Chiron, that I, as a black man who happens to be gay, have adopted my own version of this cool pose in order to survive.
I realized that very few of us black men are given the space to opt out of enacting some kind of pose or another in order to survive; survive the intra-community violence we experience, and the assaults from the outside world too; the daily anti-black encounters, the homophobia, the hyper-vigilante and hyper-masculine expectations. The implicit and explicit policing of our bodies and its very movements that most of us black men, both gay and straight, learn from jump, schooled by our own and by those outside our communities as well.
Frank
See if it is playing near you:
https://www.facebook.com/MoonlightMov/app/660307780736128/
Aromaeus
I need to see this
Kangol
It’s very well done. I was expecting more, but for what it does it does it very well, and the acting is superb. The third section in particular is far and away above anything else I’ve seen from Hollywood this year. @ErikO: It has a few of these, though. It’s based on the author’s real life story, but it goes to another place in the third section. There are still whole realms of black American and diasporic experience, though, that never make it to the big screen.
Daniel-Reader
I like that as a film it has a take on the world you seldom see but through its specific nature it becomes a potent looking glass into humanity – making it transcend into a powerful story about life, circumstance, and the human heart that’s universally relatable.
Herman75
@ErikO: At the Q&A I attended, none of the black audience members mentioned anything about stereotypes. One black gay man commented how nice it was to finally see a portrayal that was just a normal guy, and not some clownish, screaming, sassy comic relief. (not that there’s anything wrong with screaming drama queens!!!)
Brian
What I like about Moonlight is that the actors are relatively unknown. It gives the movie credibility.
I get so annoyed with the corporate black entertainers who design their act along the lines of white expectation. This often produces horrendous stereotypes that are self-perpetuating.
Realitycheck
@Scribe38: same here and I am not black, from the daily violence in school to the problems at home and the difficulties in finding one self growing up, sadly there are many similarities in that movie with the life of any gay man from a poor background and a family with problems.
Amazing movie people, go to see it you will love it.
Herman75
@Brian: Janelle Monae and Mahershala Ali are not unknown, obviously.
Kangol
@Herman75: Brian is a t-r-o-l-l. Just so you know.
AntBee
@Herman75: Naomie Harris is definitely not an unknown actor, either. Thank you for pointing out the other two well-known actors as well, @Herman75.