Oscars 2017: All the news, drama, and politics from the 89th Academy Awards

On Sunday night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, amazingly, named Moonlight the Best Picture of 2016. It was a victory made all the more stunning by the circumstances: after La La Land was initially announced as the winner, producer Jordan Horowitz told a shocked audience that Moonlight had actually won the award. A hush passed over the crowd, before eventually giving way to raucous applause. Jimmy Kimmel cracked a joke about Steve Harvey, Warren Beatty meekly apologized, and Barry Jenkins, who could hardly contain his surprise, gave a speech that put a period on the whole night. “Very clearly, even in my dreams this could not be true,” he said. “But to hell with dreams. I’m done with it, ‘cause this is true.”

After a year of controversy, the Oscars ceremony seemed to signal that the Academy’s efforts to improve diversity are working — at least where black artists are concerned. But let’s be plain here: it’s not enough, not when women and other marginalized groups are still underrepresented. The progress made on Sunday night came after years of sustained criticism that forced the industry to improve itself. Until it’s not surprising that the best picture of the year actually wins Best Picture, there will always be work to be done.

The most exciting part of a very dull Oscars ceremony last night was when the wrong movie was announced as the Best Picture winner. Presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty read out La La Land as the winner, but it turned out Beatty was holding the wrong award envelope — for Best Actress, which Emma Stone had won just prior.

La La Land’s acceptance speeches had to be interrupted to remedy the error. “This is not a joke,” La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz said. “Moonlight has won best picture.”

This year at the Oscars, much like every year at the Oscars, men were honored for the movies they made.

Outside of the women-only acting categories, almost no women were nominated for anything, and almost no women won. Casey Affleck won. Mel Gibson was not only there, but in the third row and often on camera. No one seemed to care, and the entire four-hour ceremony passed without any indication that the women in attendance, or at home, should have anything to be upset about.

While plenty of jokes and comments about our current political reality were made onstage at last night’s Academy Awards, Audible went out of its way to make commercials to criticize the White House. In two spots that aired last night, the Amazon-owned audiobook company used literature to attack the administration, without ever even saying Donald Trump’s name.

In the first spot, Homeland’s Claire Danes reads a passage from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. “Society is to blame for not providing free public education,” Danes recites, “and society will answer for the obscurity it produces.” By the end of the reading, the passage becomes a clear indictment of Trump and newly installed education secretary Betsy DeVos, who is right now pushing for alternatives to public schools.

Since the moment Barry Jenkins’ feature film Moonlight debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in November 2016, it was a critical darling, with rave reviews following it from film festivals to theatrical release to the awards-show circuit, where it’s racked up recognitions including Best Picture, Supporting Actor, and Screenplay at the Academy Awards. The film has met with nearly universal acclaim for its unusually formal yet daring approach to the familiar ground of the coming-of-age story. Writer-director Barry Jenkins based the film on Tarell McCraney’s autobiographical play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, which follows a gay black character through key moments in boyhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Jenkins’ film restructured the play into three distinct acts, set to a mixture of hip-hop and powerful orchestral music, with the central character operating under different nicknames and identities in each act.

As a child, Little (Alex Hibbert) is nearly silent, beaten into submission by boys his age who suspect him of effeminacy. His addict mother Paula (Naomie Harris) is no help, but he finds shelter with a local drug dealer (House Of Cards’ Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend (singer Janelle Monáe). As a teenager, he goes by Chiron (Ashton Sanders), and he deals with bullies and his mother in new ways. And as a heavily muscled adult with the street name Black (Trevante Rhodes), he has a commanding presence that keeps the world at bay, but he’s no less shy and withdrawn. Moonlight is an emotional, evocative piece, and it has little in common with Jenkins’ other, more prosaic film, 2008’s Medicine For Melancholy. But both films deal with the struggle for black identity, and both explore it through conversation. Both films acknowledge the protagonists’ confusion and frustration, and explore the way different groups enforce their stereotypes and resist any attempts at individuality. I spoke to Jenkins and McCraney about how the play became the film, how music and framing tell the story, and how they navigated the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.

Despite some, shall we say, hilarious reading difficulties, Moonlight has won the Oscar for Best Picture. The film managed to beat out favorite La La Land, along with other films Lion, Hacksaw Ridge, Arrival, and others.

It was a shocking turn of events for the film, even though it fully deserved the Academy’s top honor. Presenter Faye Dunaway actually announced to the audience that La La Land won the award because Warren Beatty was mistakenly handed the envelope for Best Actress, which previously went to La La Land’s Emma Stone. It was well after the producers and cast for that film came onstage that the correction was made and Moonlight took the statue.

Emma Stone has won her first Academy Award for her role as the struggling actress / playwright Mia Dolan in Damien Chazelle’s movie musical La La Land. She was nominated for an Oscar once before — Best Supporting Actress in 2014’s Best Picture-winner Birdman — but did not win.

Stone won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy in January, and collected several other revered pre-Oscar prizes in the weeks following, including the British Academy of Film and Television’s annual award and the Screen Actor’s Guild award.

Surprising no one, Casey Affleck has just won the Oscar for Best Actor for his lead role in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. He takes home the award after besting the likes of Denzel Washington and Ryan Gosling for their performances in Fences and La La Land, respectively.

Affleck’s win tonight was almost assured after taking home the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama at last month’s Golden Globes. Indeed, his performance in Manchester has already been called one of the top performances of the year. In the film, he plays Lee Chandler, a handyman who must return to the titular small town after the death of his brother to care for his teenage nephew. The film’s tragic beauty won over critics early on, and Affleck playing Lee so effectively was a big part of it.

Damien Chazelle has won his first Academy Award as the director of the movie musical La La Land. He was also nominated for the film’s screenplay earlier in the night, and was previously nominated for the screenplay of his 2014 breakout film Whiplash.

Chazelle won in a field populated by acclaimed newcomer Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), the questionably redeemed Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), recent hitmaker Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), and Academy favorite Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea). In a fairly cookie-cutter acceptance speech, he thanked his fellow nominees, “Emma [Stone] and Ryan [Gosling] for bringing the movie to life,” and his wife, emphasizing that La La Land is “a movie about love.”

For reasons that are still unclear, Seth Rogen and Michael J. Fox arrived on the Oscars stage in a DeLorean before presenting the Academy Award for Best Film Editing to Hacksaw Ridge. Rogen was even wearing Nike Air Mags. He then broke into singing a song from Hamilton. I’m very confused.

All this was probably to celebrate Back to the Future, which Rogen talked up in a filmed segment before he arrived on stage. It was quite possibly the coolest random moment in an evening full of random moments that felt shoe-horned in from out of nowhere. The awards show opened with a lengthy number featuring Justin Timberlake singing “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Trolls. Later, Kimmel rained candy from the ceiling, invited a bus full of tourists into the venue to greet the celebrities sitting in the front row, and continued his war against Matt Damon. Very little of this made sense, but hey it’s 2017 and this is our reality.

In an okay joke, a rare island in an ocean of terrible jokes, Jimmy Kimmel tweeted at Donald Trump from the Oscars stage.

The tweets themselves could have been funnier, but it was a pretty good jab at our president, who has lashed out at 20-time Oscar-nominee Meryl Streep for an awards show speech she gave about him and who can’t seem to resist tweeting about his every annoyance, paranoid conspiracy theory, and perceived slight. Kimmel tweeted “u up?” and a reference to the bizarre Streep feud.

The Academy Awards nominated the best of the best for the visual effect category this year, but in the end there could be only one winner, and it was Disney’s The Jungle Book. The film was part of a crowded field that included a variety of films from different genres. Laika’s Kubo and the Two Strings brought some stop-motion flair to the proceedings, Deepwater Horizon showed off Industrial Light & Magic’s ability to re-create real-world locations dealing the most harrowing of situations, and The Jungle Book was able to create a photorealistic world where humans could interact with walking, talking animals.

However, it was ILM’s blockbuster work on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Doctor Strange that seemed to lead the field. The latter film’s surreal, mind-bending visuals — which called to mind everything from Inception to 2001: A Space Odyssey — seemed a particularly likely candidate, as did the digitally re-created Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher that were featured in Rogue One. Instead, it was director Jon Favreau’s reimagining of Disney’s classic animated film that took home the prize.

Viola Davis is taking home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her devastating performance in Fences. After taking the stage to accept her award, she proceeded to level the audience with a soaring speech that brought some there to tears. Host Jimmy Kimmel even said that she ought to get an Emmy for it.

“We are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life,” she said in her speech, before going on to praise both director Denzel Washington and the late American playwright August Wilson, who published Fences in 1985. “Here’s to August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people,” she added.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has won his second Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, this time for The Salesman. Farhadi, in protest of President Trump’s executive orders banning travel and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, was not present to accept the award.

In his place, the award was accepted by two Iranian-American scientists: the former head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Firouz Naderi and engineer Anousheh Ansari, who is perhaps best known as the first Iranian astronaut to go to space. Ansari read a statement on behalf of Farhadi, condemning the Muslim ban as “inhumane” and going on to say that “dividing the world into us and our enemies categories creates fear.”

O.J.: Made in America, directed by Ezra Edelman, produced by Caroline Waterlow, and distributed by ESPN Films, has won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

The seven-and-a-half-hour film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of last year, and debuted in theatrical limited release last May. The documentary incorporates 72 new interviews with archival news footage to chronicle the entire career of O.J. Simpson, starting with his first season playing football at the University of Southern California and ending with his infamous 1995 murder trial. The documentary sets all of this in the broad context of American sports culture, pop culture, and systemic racism, as well as within the rise of reality TV and recent calls for criminal justice reform.

Jeff Bezos is sort of nominated for an Oscar tonight, as Amazon was the one of two distributors for Best Picture nominee Manchester by the Sea. He was shouted out in host Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue.

“If you win tonight, you can expect your Oscar to arrive in two to five business days,” Kimmel said. Good one, honestly. Better than Kimmel’s cracks about how almost no one has seen Moonlight, which came right after an extended bit about his 2006 faux-feud with Matt Damon. This segment of the awards show is typically dedicated to roasting well-known actors and directors, so it was a little odd to see a tech CEO and streaming service shouted out by the host.

Tonight’s the night for the 89th Academy Awards, which means some people will end up statue-carrying winners, and others swag bag-toting losers. It’s also the night where you find out whether you’re a better office pool prognosticator than your co-worker, and that’s where we come in. We’ve assembled a complete list of the winners from tonight’s ceremony, and we’re be updating it live throughout the evening. You know where to keep it locked.

Arrival

Google’s Spotlight Story program has come a long way since Windy Day landed on Moto X phones in 2013. Since then, the company has consistently produced short films to take advantage of smartphone hardware. In 2015, the company worked with former Disney animator Glen Keane to produce the lyrical Duet, and later signed Fast and Furious director Justin Lin for the live-action monster movie Help!. Each effort has pushed the envelope in one way or another, all in order to move stories told in 360 degrees forward.

Now, Google is heading to the Academy Awards. Pearl, directed by Oscar winner Patrick Osborne, is easily one of the most affecting Spotlight Stories to debut in recent years. A love story starring a family and their ever-present car, the film is up against Pixar’s Piper and the Annecy Jury Award-winning short Blind Vaysha for the Best Animated Short award. If it wins, it’ll be the first film of its kind to win an Oscar — an incredible feather in the cap for the house that ATAP built.

It’s Oscars time, everyone. Football teams have gone back into hibernation and the fools gold that is the Golden Globes has become a little more than faded memory. Tonight, it’s time for the big leagues: the 89th Academy Awards, as Hollywood rolls out the red carpet to take over TV (and Twitter) with incredible outfits, heartbreaking snubs, and Cinderella story upsets in pursuit of those all-important golden statutes.

The musical La La Land looks to continue its run as this season’s critical darling, and leads the pack with a record-tying 14 nominations. Those include Ryan Gosling for Best Actor, Emma Stone for Best Actress, Damien Chazelle for Best Director, and an overall Best Picture nomination, among others.

The White Helmets is a Netflix documentary nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, Short Subject. According to the AP, the film’s cinematographer, Khaled Khatib, will not be permitted to enter the United States to attend the ceremony after authorities found “derogatory information” during his background check.

The AP reports that it reviewed internal documents in which the Department of Homeland Security decided to block the cinematographer from flying to Los Angeles. Khatib had obtained a visa to enter the US, but had been detained earlier this week in Turkey for unknown reasons. “Derogatory information” is an umbrella term that can “include anything from terror connections to passport irregularities,” according to the news service.

Every year, tens of millions of people tune in to watch the Academy Awards, a star-studded evening of self-congratulations that’s so famously slow, the host is pretty much contractually obligated to make at least three jokes about how long the ceremony is running. And every year, the producers tinker with the format, questioning whether to have the Best Song nominees performed, adding or subtracting special performance segments, and in 2016, adding a “thank-you scroll” to encourage winners not to just spend their speech on a list of names. But every year, pundits still mull over ways to save the ceremony from itself, from the four-hour runtime, the stilted speeches, the sense of repetition, the long wait to get to the key awards, and the rush once we finally get there.

Like the world in general, The Verge’s culture writers have different stands on the Oscars — some of us tune in religiously, some of us are willing to channel-surf over to the ceremony between binge-watching episodes of something livelier on Netflix, and some of us would have to be wrapped in straitjackets and strapped to a couch before we could sit through the whole thing. But we’ve been thinking about what could rehabilitate the Academy Awards for us — not just the ceremony, but the whole shebang. Here are some thoughts from the staff.

The 89th annual Academy Awards are this Sunday at 8:30pm ET. Despite minor and inevitable backlash, La La Land and Moonlight remain the frontrunners for the evening. Check out the nominations for this pair along with other films before the big night.

The nominees for the 89th annual Academy Awards are finally in. As if there was any doubt, Moonlight and La La Land, two of the biggest movies of 2016, will face off at the awards, as each raked in the most nominations across all categories. La La Land earned a record-tying 14 nominations, including a Best Picture nod and two for Best Original Song. That number ties it with Titanic and All About Eve for the most number of nominations for a single film. All things considered, it may well be La La Land’s night, but Moonlight, with its eight nominations, could still come away winning big at the show.

The crush of Hollywood awards season has provided ample opportunity for people in the entertainment industry to speak out about current political events, and almost everyone with something to say has taken advantage. Last month, Meryl Streep drew wild applause (and a presidential hate-tweet) after speaking out against Donald Trump at the Golden Globes, and Aaron Sorkin followed suit days ago by issuing his own creative call-to-arms when taking home the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award at this year’s Writer’s Guild of America show.

Both cases were classic Hollywood political speechifying: an acclaimed artist expressing their own deeply held personal views to a largely like-minded, receptive audience. So with the Oscars coming up this weekend, the question isn’t “Will somebody make a political statement?” but “How many people will make political statements?” No matter your personal views, we live in a charged time of outrage and unrest, and for the past 15 years, we’ve grown comfortable with the idea of the Academy Awards as a political platform. (I don’t want to sound too cynical, but last year I suggested to some friends that we should place bets over whether Leonardo DiCaprio would mention climate change if he won for The Revenant. We didn’t; he did.)

This upcoming Sunday is the Oscars, but it’s also the usual air time for some of HBO’s biggest weekly series. So to avoid the scheduling clash, HBO will make this week’s episodes of Girls, Crashing, and Big Little Lies available to stream early.

The episodes, which will be the second of the season for Crashing and Big Little Lies, and the third of the season for Girls, will be available on HBO Now, HBO Go, and on-demand this Friday, February 24th, ScreenCrush reports.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has had a tough year. In January 2016, after it announced the nominees for the 88th Academy Awards, a loud outcry from inside and outside the industry erupted, taking Hollywood to task for its failure to nominate actors and filmmakers of color. It was the second year in a row non-white talent was largely overlooked, leading to boycotts of the award show, star-studded events organized as counterprogramming, and promises from the Academy that it would do better. Even host Chris Rock addressed the controversy the night of the awards, though the reaction to his treatment of the issue was mixed.

A focal point of the controversy was the viral #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, created in 2015 by activist and BroadwayBlack.com managing editor April Reign to take on the lack of inclusion in film. The hashtag crescendoed over social media, starting off as conversation between fans, but eventually gaining enough steam to attract performers like The Weeknd and even video game developers. Using the hashtag, director Spike Lee wrote on Instagram that he would sit out the awards show, writing, “How is it possible for the second consecutive year all 20 contenders under the acting category are white? And let’s not even get into the other branches.”