La La Land and Hollywood’s everlasting love affair with itself

Two years before that, Ben Affleck took the top prize for Argo, a tense, roaringly entertaining fact-based thriller in which outer-world political drama the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981 was given a literal Hollywood rescue, as the film drolly mapped out the artificial American film production dreamed up by the CIA and studio insiders to bring the captives home. And that was only a year after Hollywood fell head over heels for the French film-maker Michel Hazanaviciuss The Artist, a delightful homage to American silent cinema and old-school silver-screen glamour that pre-empted much of what Birdman had to say about the insecurities of male stardom, albeit in a more winsome way. Taking five Oscars that same year? Martin Scorseses Hugo, a family fantasy in which a young Parisian orphan is enraptured by the innovations of the silent-cinema pioneer Georges Mlis.

Citing all these examples the day after the Globes, the film writer Mark Harris caustically implored awards voters to stop ratifying yourselves. He continued: The history of the Oscars is going to be, For decades, the Academy gave Best Picture to all kinds of things. Then they stopped.

Harriss comments may not be entirely fair: alongside the aforementioned films, the Academy has also recently given their top honor to such stern, serious-minded films about subjects far outside the Tinseltown bubble as Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave and The Hurt Locker. Meanwhile, it would be reductive to suggest that films about the entertainment industry are inherently trivial or irrelevant to those outside it. La La Lands bittersweet romance between a struggling actor and a struggling musician aims for a more universally poignant reflection on the pursuit of dreams, and the frequent incompatibility between personal ambition and romantic stability. The narrative, one pushed even by many of its admirers, that its a sunny escape outlet for audiences and awards voters alike from the troubled political present doesnt quite account for what a melancholy, intimate reverie Chazelle has made; its not exactly Chekhovian in its human insight, but neither is it an alien property to many people who have been either in love or in career stasis.

Admittedly, its also not Moonlight, a film being presented by many critics as a neat corrective to the Hollywood insularity that benefits La La Land. Widely seen as running second to Chazelles film in the Oscar race, despite a dominant run through the US critics awards, Barry Jenkinss delicate work of lyrical realism, focused on identity conflict and burgeoning sexuality within Miamis disenfranchised African American community, could hardly seem less familiar to most west coast voters. Jenkins and his team didnt hide their surprise when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association handed the film its best drama film prize after denying it any other wins a victory largely overshadowed by La La Lands vast haul. Beneath producer Adele Romanskis onstage admission that she didnt think this was going to happen was a suggestion that Moonlights team isnt expecting the Hollywood vote that they have suspicions about the limits, or at least the preferential inclinations, of the in-crowds empathy.

No film with a worldview quite like Moonlights has ever won best picture. And while its easy to argue for the formal daring, tonal novelty and accomplished high-wire execution of La La Land in many respects only in the endlessly sniping atmosphere of awards season would a fully original contemporary musical be dismissed by detractors as safe or formulaic in 2017 its harder to claim that its perspective on the world is one Academy types havent seen and endorsed before.

Hollywoods fascination with its own image isnt necessarily an artistically limiting one. If there were any journalists complaining about Oscar voters self-interested nature in 1950, when the race was led by two now-immortal black comedies on thespian self-interest (All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard), its safe to say the voters were right not to listen. And while Bob Fosses egotism was the butt of numerous media jokes in 1979, when his thrilling autobiographical backstage biopsy All That Jazz was up for best picture (it lost to the more tasteful and broadly relatable domestic drama of Kramer vs. Kramer), the film has outlasted them.

Meanwhile, its a misconception that Hollywood has always voted with one eye in the looking-glass; there have been eras of drably earnest Oscar voting when showbiz storytelling could hardly compete with more capital-I Important fare. Perhaps the Academy of today might have voted for Sydney Pollacks wise, riotous TV-industry satire Tootsie over the laboriously noble Gandhi a case of voters scrupulously attempting to recognize a world beyond their own, and getting it snoozily wrong in the process and Hollywood history would be better for it. The mirror, quoth Barbra Streisand, has two faces, and sometimes seeing yourself isnt quite the same as admiring the view. Which side of itself Los Angeles is collectively seeing in La La Land a film that, in a single envelope, sends the City of Angels both a vibrantly painted valentine and a Dear John letter listing its crueler failings is still open to question.