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At the 1984 Academy Awards, a befuddled Laurence Olivier, nearing the end of his storied career, came out to present the Oscar for Best Picture. Instead of reading the names of the films nominated for the award, he immediately announced the name of the winner as Amadeus. What wasn’t known at the time was that Olivier hadn’t opened the envelope revealing the name of the winner. He looked at the name of the first nominee on the back of the envelope, which happened to be Amadeus, and announced that as the winner. Fortunately, Amadeus was the actual winner. Nothing like that has happened since, but something similar happened at last week’s presentation of the 2016 Academy Awards.

This got me to thinking that instead of the mix-up occurring at the Best Picture presentation, suppose an incident like the Olivier one happened with the presentation of another award, such as Best Supporting Actress. Imagine that Mark Rylance had looked at the back of the envelope instead of opening it, and announced Viola Davis in Fences as the winner, but after giving her acceptance speech, it was revealed that the actual winner was Naomie Harris in Moonlight. It would have been devastating for both actresses.

Instead, this year’s awards ended on a high note when Warren (Rules Don’t Apply) Beatty and Faye Dunaway, his Bonnie and Clyde co-star of fifty years ago, were given the wrong envelope, resulting in the announcement of tinsel-town favorite La La Land as the winner, when underdog Moonlight turned out to be the actual winner, resulting in a heartfelt expression of movie love between the producers of the two films. Coincidentally, both Moonlight and Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply were released on Blu-ray and standard DVD two days later.

Moonlight is an unconventional winner in many ways. It was adapted from an unproduced play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, which under Academy rules should have allowed writer-producer-director Barry Jenkins’ screenplay to be considered an original, pitting it against Manchester by the Sea in the Best Original Screenplay category. Instead, it was ruled an adaptation, which allowed both of this year’s best written screenplays to win Oscars, one of only two Oscars the film received in addition to its win for Best Picture. The other was Best Supporting Actor, for which Mahershala Ali became the first actor to win for a sympathetic portrayal of a drug dealer. Interestingly, Ali is the first Muslim winner in any acting category [Editor’s Note: at the time Ellen Burstyn won her Oscar for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, she was actively practicing Sulfism, a form of Islamic mysticism, making her the first Muslim winner].

The film itself is about a poor, shy, gay, black kid growing up in the Miami slums, about as unusual a subject as ever there was in a Best Picture nominee, let alone, a winner. Although just about everyone admired the film, no one expected it to win over La La Land, an immensely popular film celebrating Hollywood in the tradition of Singin’ in the Rain, a film that was itself overlooked by the Academy. Singin’ in the Rain had been nominated for just two Oscars at the 1952 Academy Awards – Best Supporting Actress (Jean Hagen) and Best Scoring (Lennie Hayton).

In more recent times, films about Hollywood such as 2011’s The Artist and 2012’s Argo have become almost guaranteed Best Picture winners. Even films about Los Angeles in general, such as 2005’s Crash, could pull out a win above a more critically acclaimed film such as Brokeback Mountain, which was widely expected to be the first film with a predominant gay subject matter to win Best Picture. Ironically, that distinction went instead to the far less seen Moonlight, eleven years later.

The structure of Moonlight is also an unusual one. Instead of giving us a conventional linear narrative, Jenkins gives us snapshots of the life of its main character, Chiron, at three points in his life. He is wonderfully played as a boy by Alex Hibbert, as a teenager by Ashton Sanders, and as a young man by Trevante Rhodes. Equally memorable are Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and Andrรฉ Holland as his friend, Kevin, at the same points in his life. Rounding out the brilliant supporting cast in addition to Ali, are Janelle Monae as Ali’s girlfriend, and the aforementioned Naomie Harris as Chiron’s crack-addicted mother, the only performer in the film to have scenes with all three actors playing her son.

1967’s In the Heat of the Night was the first film to feature a black actor in the lead. 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and 2013’s 12 Years a Slave were the only such subsequent winners. 1969’s Midnight Cowboy was the first and only previous winner to significantly feature gay content. Moonlight is the first film told from both a black and a gay perspective. For parents who may be concerned about the sexual content, it should be noted that there is more sex in the first five minutes of any episode of Law and Order: SVU than there is in this entire film.

Rules Don’t Apply is the Howard Hughes film Warren Beatty has wanted to make for years. Critics expecting a biopic were disappointed. It’s not a biopic, it’s an old-fashioned love story about a young actress put under exclusive contract by Hughes and the young chauffeur who drives her around. Co-written by Beatty and Bo Goldman, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Melvin and Howard, this film, like that one, features Hughes’ character as a supporting one.

Having read nothing but negative reviews about the film, I wasn’t expecting much, but found myself cheering for the engaging couple, nicely played by Lily Collins as the aspiring actress and Alden Ehrenreich as her ambitious chauffeur. The supporting cast is a rich one. It includes Matthew Broderick as Ehrenreich’s fellow chauffeur, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin as Hughes’ lawyers, Candice Bergen as his secretary, and Annette Bening as Collins’ mother. Ehrenreich was nominated for several critics’ awards for his performance in conjunction with his other 2016 role in Hail, Caesar!

My only quibble with the film is its setting most of the narrative in 1959, showing Hughes still running RKO and marrying Jean Peters. The truth is he married Peters in January 1957, the same month he sold RKO to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Also, releasing on Blu-ray and standard DVD, two days after this year’s Academy Awards, were Doctor Strange and Allied, both of which were nominated for a single Oscar each. The Oscars they were nominated for are the best things about both these films. For Doctor Strange, it’s the visual effects. For Allied, it’s the costumes.

This week’s new releases include Jackie and the Criterion Edition of 45 Years.

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