Moonlight richly deserved to trump La La Land. Here’s why

Moonlight is, in fact, a traditional story about identity, and finding out who you are, but it has rarely been better told, or more achingly, or while navigating a subject that hasn’t come up much at the cinema, if at all. (Being black and gay.) True enough, everyone expected La La Land to win best picture at the Oscars, but it’s Moonlight that deserved the award – and every award going (aside from the one that’s been put aside for Annette Bening). I liked La La Land well enough at the time, but someone please make it go away now.

The film is written and directed by Barry Jenkins, as based on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s semi-autobiographical but never performed play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. It’s set in the poor Liberty City projects in Miami, where both men grew up, and was filmed in just 25 days. This does give it a pressure-cooker intensity of the kind that, say, isn’t found in movies where white people endlessly mansplain jazz — what can I say? I liked it well enough at the time, but now it’s so annoying — yet it is also a film of the utmost delicacy.