A Constant Visual Feast

This is it, dudes and dudettes: My last “best of 2016” post, at least I think it is, because who knows, I could have written a thing or three for other lists that I’ve just plum forgotten about. 

Anywho, what the title says. The Online Film Critics Society has announced the winners of its 2016 awards rumpus. It’s over. It’s done. Moonlight stole the show, as it should, because it’s a great movie. It’s important to me that Barry Jenkins and his movie both receive tons of attention as we head into the industry side of awards season, in which the far inferior La La Land will almost certainly wind up overtaking it as both awards pundits and actual film critics line up to fellate it and Damien Chazelle for the great achievement of making a mediocre contemporary version of an old-style Hollywood musical.  Unlike a too-large percentage of critics, when I say that diversity matters to me, I actually mean it.

La La Land won a couple of things, of course, but if La La Land should win for anything, it’s Best Editing and Best Cinematography, because Tom Cross and Linus Sandgren both did a phenomenal job of tricking people who are supposed to know how films are made into thinking that Damien Chazelle is capable of doing one-take musical numbers.

You can tell by now that my ambivalence for La La Land has morphed into contempt, but that’s the sort of place 2016 has left me. (The same goes for Hell or High Water, but I’m much less offended by that film’s assisted ascent to “best of” status.) Suffice to say that I’m happy to see Moonlight do so well, but aside from Kubo, that’s about it as far as seeing movies and people I like get the awards I think they deserve. Maybe you’ll disagree with me here. Maybe you think that the movies that won deserved to win, and that’s cool. Consensus is boring. But if you ask me, so are most of the OFCS voting body’s ballots. So it goes.