The two men whose movies won best picture at this year’s Oscars – albeit one of them only briefly – have talked about their solidarity in a joint interview.
Speaking to Variety the morning after an Oscars ceremony that will be remembered for the final-reel fiasco that saw La La Land wrongly named best picture, before the award was rightly given to Moonlight, Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle discussed the camaraderie they found had come with a long campaign, climaxing in such strange style.
“It’s messy, but it’s kind of gorgeous,” said Jenkins of the envelope cock-up. “You have these two groups of people who came together for a second. There’s a picture with me hugging Jordan [Horowitz, a producer on La La Land], and Adele [Romanski, producer of Moonlight] has her arm on his shoulder. That’s what the moment was.”
Chazelle added: “Everything looked so energised, I at first thought there was some kind of prank going on.”
Jenkins, meanwhile, revealed that his planned speech had to be rethought in the chaotic moment. “I had something that I had prepared to say, and that thing went completely out the window,” he said.
“I’ve been saying that [co-writer] Tarell [Alvin McCraney] and I are that kid in the film, and that kid does not grow up to make a piece of art that gets eight Academy Award nominations. It’s a dream I never allowed myself to have. When we were sitting there, and that dream of winning didn’t come true, I took it off the table. But then I had to very quickly get back into that place. And my first thought was to get to the stage to give Jordan a hug as quickly as possible.”
Both men made history on Sunday evening, with Chazelle, at 32, becoming the youngest person to win best director, while Jenkins’s movie was the first LGBT film to take best picture.
“I will be glad when all these firsts and thirds and fifths are a thing of the past,” Jenkins says. “So it’s bittersweet. But it’s not something you set out to do. I don’t think Damien set out to be the youngest winning director. You kind of just create the work. These things just happen, until they don’t.”
