So, it happened. After months of laughing and back-slapping, faux modest smiles, sexual harassment allegations and aggressive charm offensives (looking at you, McConaughey), we have our Oscar winners for 2017. Yes, I know, Moonlight! So beautiful, so nuanced, so IMPORTANT. But is its cultural importance enough to warrant its win? I’d venture not.

Instead, let’s focus on aesthetics. The film toes an awkward line between the impressionistic and the slight – the sparse dialogue, portentous looks and colourised lighting create precisely the kind of spare, ‘fill the gaps with meaning’ picture that immediately ordains a film a ‘masterpiece’. By providing the audience with little, the audience imposes significance, rather than discovering it (where arguably it isn’t). La La Land has been accused of being a confection of camera flourishes and allusions to a bygone era, but Moonlight is similarly superficial. It’s just that its cinematic language is that of the celebrated ‘boundary-pushing’ indie rather than the swooning Oscar darling.

“Moonlight’s cultural achievements have somehow forced us to elevate its lesser visual achievements as a means of qualifying its importance”

A static shot of a satiated hand post-handjob, basked in the moonlight, is celebrated because it beautifies a taboo: two attractive black men attaining sexual and emotional release under the cover of night. So far, so cinematically transgressive. But surely there is also value in the mastery of an established visual language? La La Land’s alternative reality sequence, in which the characters step through different paintings and familiar looking film sets, achieves just as valuable a symbolic resonance (as well as displaying as impressive a feat of production) as Moonlight. The appropriation of other art forms becomes a further iteration of the characters’ own delusions; the artifice of film engendering their romantic communion and then their demise. Love, like film, is fantasy. Who’s to say which meaning is more valuable? Who established the rubric that to be a great film, you must push cultural boundaries? 

Yes, La La Land is flawed, but if we are going to venture that Moonlight is somehow more meaningful and visually poetic by contrast, we should isolate its competitors’ semiotic achievements against it. It’s likely we’ll find just as much to celebrate and ponder on. Instead, I wonder whether Moonlight’s cultural achievements have somehow forced us to elevate its lesser visual achievements as a means of qualifying its importance. Held to this standard, I don’t think its victory is earned.

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However, the botched Best Picture announcement did provide us with one powerful image. The sight of a flustered member of the cinematic old guard, Warren Beatty, as a sea of white faces slowly became subsumed by a torrent of brown ones couldn’t have stuck a better finger up to 2016’s whitewashed Oscars. That might have been Moonlight’s most effective visual flourish, a sign of burgeoning balance. The tide hasn’t turned completely, but it's moving in the right direction