Coming of age drama about a gay black man defeats hot favourite La La Land to win the Academy’s top award, after debacle in which Damien Chazelle’s film read out as winner by Faye Dunaway
February 27, 2017:Â Moonlight has won the best picture Oscar in an unlikely victory, sensationally defeating the strong favourite La La Land.
This was after Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway read out La La Land as the victor – and the cast and crew took to the stage and completed many of their acceptance speeches.
Directed by Barry Jenkins and adapted from an unpublished playscript by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight won near-universal critical plaudits for its depiction of the coming of age of a gay black teenager from a rough neighbourhood in Miami.
It defeated nine other films in the Oscar race: apart from hot favourite La La Land, it also beat Kenneth Lonergan’s grief drama Manchester by the Sea and the commercially successful Hidden Figures, about black female mathematicians who worked on Nasa’s moon mission in the 1960s.
