SANTA MONICA, California – Oscar night is unlikely to be all that favorabletowards Moonlight—Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali and possibly an adapted screenplay award are its best bets—but the day before the Academy closes out awards season, Barry Jenkins’s masterpiece cleaned up at the more freewheeling and casual Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica.
In addition to picking up the Robert Altman Award for its ensemble,Moonlight won every other category in which it was nominated, taking home a total of six statues, including Best Feature, Best Directing, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing. During a La La Land-free award show, Moonlight was king.
The film, which cost just $1.5 million and has brought in over $21 million in box office receipts, also cemented its status as the favorite film of the year among the event’s diverse attendees.
Before I could finish asking The Wire’s Andre Royo what film he was rooting for at this award show as wells as at the Oscars, he said, “Moonlight is the best film of the year.” He not only praised the filmmakers, but also the audiences who turned out to see it. “Back in the day, there wouldn’t have been that broad of an audience,” he said of the movie that tells the story of a black gay man during three distinct periods in his life. He was still holding out hope that it could beat La La Land for Best Picture at the Oscars.
Kerry Washington expressed a similar sentiment when she presented the ensemble award to Moonlight during the ceremony, breaking from her script to declare, “Oh dear Lord, I love this movie.” Like Altman, she said, “Until it existed, we didn’t know we wanted it. But now that it’s here, we know we need it. And in witnessing it, we are forever transformed.”
Jenkins left the political speechifying to his writing partner Tarell Alvin McCraney, who penned the play on which Moonlight was based. There were a lot of actors, he said, who “pushed that script away from them, saying that it might affect their career in the long run.” He praised the actors in the film like André Holland and Trevante Rhodes for finding the “truth in the story we were telling,” and telling it well.
The Independent Spirit Awards has long been the most diverse award show on the scene in Hollywood, a fact that was especially evident during the past two years of #OscarsSoWhite. Even this year, when the Academy course-corrected and nominated a record seven actors of color, including Lion’s Dev Patel, the Spirits represented an even more diverse group of nominees and winners.
There was Andrew Ahn, who accepted the John Cassavetes Award, which recognizes films that cost under $500,000, for Spa Night, who thanked his parents for accepting their “gay Korean-American son.” And Toni Erdmann’s Maren Ade who accepted the Best International Film Award by saying she’s proud to be a female director, because it’s “still not normal enough.”
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