Top Five Highlights of the 2016-17 Awards Season

I've vented my biggest frustrations, but the only proper way to put the season to rest is by celebrating those moments which made me most happy.

Top Five Highlights of the 2016-17 Awards Season:

5. Biopic curse broken

We were this close five years ago to having a winning lineup of actors who played four fictional characters, but then Meryl's imitation of Maggie Thatcher thwarted that plan by beating Viola Davis' ordinary hero Aibileen Clark in what we can only speculate was a photo finish. How fitting it then is that Viola is now part of the first winners' circle to feature no real life roles since the class of '97. Chalk it up if you must to a year that was a bit leaner on biopics than usual, but it's still refreshing to see four thespians clutching Oscars for playing the kinds of 'ordinary people' that Viola so passionately celebrated in every acceptance speech this season.

Oscars Post-mortem, Part 4: Favourite Nuggets

You can't catch everything there is to catch at the Oscars in one viewing. Half the joy is going back and putting the telecast under a microscope, looking for all the tiny bemusing details. These are my favourite such nuggets from the show:

Someone from Alessandro Bertolazzi's cheering section records his Oscar speech on a phone with a Suicide Squad Joker skin. How apropos.

No Words -- Should've Sent A Poet

March is the month to decompress, go enjoy some bad movies, and stop thinking about Oscar for a spell. It does even the hungriest awards enthusiast good to take one's mind off the madness. But none of this sabbatical comes before extensive analyses and rundowns of the season that was, so I'll be rolling out my thoughts sporadically as we creep out of winter and into a new movie year.

I normally devote an entire piece to dissecting my predictions, but why even bother this year? With so many categories defying the patterns on which most pundits have come to rely (especially in the crafts), I wound up with an unexpected and historic low of 13 (uck), and in what I foolishly assumed would be a bounceback from last year's lacklustre 16/24.

I can deliver my thoughts on how I reacted to those losses -- some of which provided me with the most satisfying moments of the night, the year, and possibly the decade so far -- at a later date. First I have to go out of order and address the elephant in the room.

You know what I'm talking about.

One Category at a Time: Best Adapted Screenplay

When AMPAS made its ruling to move Moonlight to Best Adapted Screenplay from its Original designation, it looked as though the way was paved for Barry Jenkins to claim at least one Oscar of his own for one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year. But the situation is not so cut and dry...

One Category at a Time: Best Director

Splits between Best Picture an Best Director have a weird arrhythmic history at the Oscars. They seem to crop up in bunches before to returning to long stretches when it never happens. We seem to be in the middle (or perhaps the end) of one such bunch, which has seen these two top categories go different ways in three of the last four years. Whether or not this is a blip on the radar or a more mainstaying result of the current Best Picture voting mathematics might require a few more years to suss out, but this year it appears that things will return to the status quo.

Moonlight Wins USC Scripter, plus ADG Winners

Moonlight's Barry Jenkins and Tarrell Alvin McCraney won the USC Scripter Award last night, which honours the best page-to-screen adaptations of the year by giving prizes to both the screenwriter and the author of the original source material.

Oddly, the Academy still included McCraney in the Oscar nomination as well, but if you're willing to give McCraney story credit on this project (for writing a play that never got produced), doesn't that mean you're treating it like an original screenplay? I don't think too many people are going to complain about McCraney standing alongside Jenkins with an Oscar in hand two weeks from now, but I'm curious to hear where others stand on this question.

My Award Nominations: Director

Tomorrow the DGA will bestow its yearly honours for the year's best direction in television and film. Barring some kind of earth-shaking upset, we can expect to see Damien Chazelle and Garth Davis take home prizes for Best Director and Best First-Time Director respectively. Best Documentary Direction is a bit more up in the air, but I'm betting it'll be Ezra Edelman for O.J.

My own ballot for Best Director follows:

My Awards: Adapted Screenplay

Competitive field this year, especially with previously assumed originals Moonlight and Loving being shifted (correctly, I believe) to the race for Best Adapted Screenplay. Here are the scribes who I feel did the best job at turning their non-cinematic source material into beautiful moving pictures:

'Moonlight' Gains Foothold by Being Out the Gate (Relatively) Early

The biggest Supermoon in 70 years may have astronomers flocking to their telecscopes this weekend, but a far more luminous object has cinephiles flocking to their arthouses as Moonlight continue its expansion in its 3rd week of release.

Barry Jenkins' soulful sophomore feature is every bit as exquisite as you've read, but I can understand its cautious release strategy; A triptych character study about a young gay black man struggling with his singular and fluid sense of self is, admittedly, a tough sell. But those willing to believe that crises of identity are universal to all people -- as Jenkins clearly does ("In the moonlight, all boys look blue...") -- will find themselves hard pressed not to be moved by the poignant and painful discoveries of Chiron's childhood, youth and adulthood.