OPINION

BRUMMETT ONLINE: It’s all politics, isn’t it?

It was a major political event — don’t you see? So many things are.

On Sunday night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences first gave its Best Picture Oscar to La La Land, then took the award back and said, oops, these statues were supposed to go to Moonlight.

I’d thought of the tweet myself, but, within seconds of the colossal blunder, others beat me to it. They said La La Land won the popular vote but Moonlight won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

And another: “La La Land wins Oscar — fake news.”

There were more serious social-media lamentations that we can’t believe anything or get anything right anymore.

Five smug Fox News commentators, but I repeat myself, sat around a table the next day and chortled that the movie industry that had so disparaged President Donald Trump would prove itself unable to execute the simple presentation of its biggest award.

You can guess the spiel: How can these Left Coast show-biz ditzes dare criticize a noble man’s stewardship of the country when they can’t even run a once-a-year award show?

And this one: That near 3-million-vote popular victory for Hillary Clinton? It was from that very Left Coast where flaky people like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway stagger around trying to remember which of them was Bonnie and which was Clyde.

The facts, as usual, complicated the race to political metaphor.

It was the corporate accounting giant, PwC, formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers, that was mostly to blame.

A representative of the firm handed the wrong envelope to Beatty and Dunaway as they, in commemoration of the 50-year anniversary of their Bonnie and Clyde, took the stage to present the night’s final and biggest award.

What got handed them mistakenly was a duplicate card for the best actress award, which had just gone to Emma Stone … of La La Land.

Beatty, to his credit, hesitated when he saw the card. Dunaway seemed to think he was simply stalling for a clowning effect. He handed the card to her and, apparently, she, seeing La La Land, but not “Emma Stone,” proclaimed La La Land the winner.

Beatty probably should have said at that point, “That may not be right,” but the celebration had begun.

It all made sense because La La Land was the favorite. Its director and lead actress had just won Oscars.

The academy couldn’t very well have simply let the mistaken but credible scenario stand. That was because of fairness and accuracy and integrity, of course, not to mention real politics.

The academy had been severely criticized the year before for an all-white cast of major nominees. It had more than made up for that, but not by forcing any issues. It turned out that most of the best movies nominated legitimately Sunday evening were about black themes and starred black actors in stirring performances — Fences, Hidden Figures and … Moonlight, for example.

Moonlight was a powerfully touching tale of a young black male’s haunted existence that had him struggling not only with race, and class, and a drug culture, and crime, and bullying, but his own sexuality.

Moonlight was a politically correct, and worthy enough, winner.

Movies and their big annual award show almost always lend themselves to political, cultural or topical applications. It’s what I enjoy most about good films. Spotlight let me argue the case for newspapers. American Sniper let me argue with myself about what Clint Eastwood meant to say about war. Birdman made me wonder what the hell had happened.

This year, alas, I am left to my own political incorrectness. I didn’t think Moonlight should have won.

I preferred the mistaken announcement anointing La La Land, a Hollywood story about the power of music and of two young white kids and their imaginings and dreams.

It redefined the musical, I thought. The characters didn’t suddenly break into song and dance so that subpar actors could be spared the delivery of lines and permitted to showcase their real talent. The song-and-dance moments of La La Land illustrated and punctuated the young lovers’ most magical experiences and imaginings.

I wish La La Land had won for real.

But that it didn’t — after it did — offered no real implications, I submit, for the Trump presidency or our contemporary predicament.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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