Donald Trump might have had a deplorable smile on his face as he watched the ending of these Oscars and it wouldn’t be just for the reason of the confusion on the presentation of the Best Picture award. But more to the point, what we witnessed last night was political correctness to the ultimate degree claiming the Best Picture Award via the low budget film Moonlight.
Let me be clear before I go further, this was not a great year for movies. There was not one epic classic film in the mix. It was a field of flawed finalists—kind of like our recent election. Seems fitting, doesn’t it?
I saw Moonlight first on my list of Oscar finalist lists and it was completely and totally unimpressive. It was a depressing film about the plight of young black males in this country told through the voice of its main character—a young black male by the name of Sheron who is raised by his drug addicted mother. Granted—this film does give a hardcore realistic look at the black male situation as we see it in the politically charged year of 2017, but the story never moves, the writing is predictable, the performances were in no way inspiring or even overly interesting. When I walked out of the theatre I felt like I had wasted two hours of my life.
The main character Sheron isn’t all that compelling even though he’s both black and gay and turns out to be a drug dealer like his absent father. I couldn’t discover a silver lining message in the movie unless it’s that more black fathers throughout this country need to become responsible fathers or else the cycle of Sherons will continue to repeat itself regardless of what governmental programs are put in place. I hate to sound so callous, but as a country we’ve been having this national discussion since LBJ and nothing has really changed.
I in no way found this to be a story of self discovery or of one’s mission found in life, but rather a politically correct film which won the best picture award in the Year of Trump/Bannon. It just really wasn’t that good of a story and the writing at best was mediocre.
Over the years, I’ve seen some brilliant movies highlighting black actors with a black societal theme. This clearly is not in the club of these great movies. Sidney Poitier was exceptional in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and it rates in my top five movies of all-time. The epic film Twelve Years a Slave left me motionless in a theatre just several years ago. I literally sat in a darkened theatre with tears rolling off my face as the story and performances were of such strength.
The Color Purple was a magnificent movie. Forest Whitaker’s performance in The Last King of Scotland is one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen in any movie. Likewise, Jamie Fox’s depiction of Ray Charles was simply brilliant. And who could ever forget the racially charged A Time to Kill as Jake Brigance saves Carl Hailey’s life with a closing summation for the ages. Unfortunately, there was nothing brilliant, magnificent, or even interesting in the movie Moonlight, but rather a win for political correctness.
A bad night for the Oscars.
Here’s a breakdown of the movie. Maybe this story should have been told under the genre of a documentary and it would have served a better purpose. Or maybe in book form with it being told as a journal in the first person narrative of Sheron it would come off better for me. But as a two hour feature film–not so much.