Oscars 2017: 89th Academy Awards news, winners, and biggest moments

At the Oscars, the award for Original Song (and Original Score) is just what it sounds like — music written specifically for a film, rather than for something else.

For instance, Jennifer Lawrence’s 2014 performance of “The Hanging Tree” from the third Hunger Games movie was ineligible, because its lyrics were written by Suzanne Collins for the Hunger Games book series. The music was original to the movie, but that’s not enough.

Glamorous actors are the center of attention at the Oscars, but the Best Picture trophy — the biggest award of all — honors producers, who are typically obscure to the mass public.

This is a throwback to the Academy’s roots in the Hollywood of the late silent era, when producers were the most important people in the film industry. (That description would largely hold true, give or take a particularly prominent director, until the 1960s and ‘70s.)

The Academy Awards are extra-judicious in what they honor. There are plenty of proposed Oscars — including best stunt coordination, best ensemble cast (or best casting), and best voiceover performance — but they seem unlikely to ever materialize. At the very least, it’s safe to say the Oscars will never come close to handing out as many trophies as, say, the Grammys, which reward nominees in more than 80 categories.

Meanwhile, the Academy seems to like its current number of 24 categories (plus a dormant 25th category, Original Song Score, which hasn’t been awarded since 1985 — when it went to Prince for Purple Rain — due to a lack of nominees). The last new category to be added was Best Animated Feature, first awarded in 2002 (to Shrek).

At the Oscars, what’s the difference between original screenplays and adapted screenplays?

On its face, the answer is easy: Adapted screenplays are based on other works, while original screenplays are based on the writer’s own idea. In practice, the distinction is a bit more complicated.

There was a major twist ending and a major snafu at the very end of the 2017 Academy Awards for the category of Best Picture. The wrong winner was declared. If you look back on the footage and analyze it, you could read on presenter Warren Beatty’s face that something was not right just before the Best Picture winner was announced.

Let’s quickly review the second-by-second timeline of what happened:

The Oscars ended so chaotically that host Jimmy Kimmel didn’t get to wrap up the ceremony as he’d planned — but knowing that his big finish was apparently another “Jimmy Kimmel hates Matt Damon” joke, that’s probably just as well.

All night long, Kimmel needled his fake frenemy Damon as part of their longstanding “feud.” During the monologue, he called Damon an idiot who wasted the chance to play an Oscar-winning role in Manchester by the Sea — which Damon produced — by handing the part to Casey Affleck so he could go do “a Chinese ponytail movie” (i.e., The Great Wall).

The divisiveness of responses to La La Land has become a story in itself, culminating at Sunday’s Oscars with a mistaken Best Picture win that was ultimately handed over to true winner Moonlight while seemingly staging in real time critics’ and audiences’ enduring ambivalence to the film. Regardless of the merits of La La Land’s direction and acting, though, there is one Oscar this ode to old Hollywood movie musicals deserved wholeheartedly — the Best Original Song trophy it took home for “City of Stars.”

“City of Stars” may not be La La Land’s catchiest or most exuberant number, and the other La La Land song nominated for an Oscar, “Audition (Fools Who Dream),” is arguably more emotionally moving. But “City of Stars” has become La La Land’s de facto theme song because it’s the song most central to the film’s overarching ideas; it’s the movie in microcosm. This carefully constructed musical number collapses La La Land’s entire plot into a two-and-a-half-minute duet by using techniques borrowed equally from old Hollywood and Romantic opera.

What happened at the Oscars is unprecedented.

The night’s biggest award — Best Picture — was handed to the wrong film, presumed frontrunner La La Land, because presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were given the wrong envelope. It bore the name of La La Land’s Emma Stone, who had won Best Actress moments before.

Moonlight is the little movie that could, and the fact that it made it to the Oscars at all is a shock. That it won Best Picture — even setting aside the bizarre manner in which it ultimately won — is practically a miracle.

Moonlight doesn’t star any household names — though that may change soon, especially with Mahershala Ali’s Best Supporting Actor win. Its director, Barry Jenkins, has only directed one other feature film, Medicine for Melancholy, which had a staggeringly low budget of $15,000.

The 2017 Oscars celebrated two men famously accused of hurting women.

One of them was a superstar when the accusations against him went public eight years ago. Since then he’d been on a fame hiatus, but now he’s making a comeback. The film he directed was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and he grinned through the handful of mild jokes that were made at his expense during the ceremony.

One of the most shocking Oscars ceremonies in recent memory — or hell, any memory — has come to a close, with Moonlight upsetting frontrunner La La Land to win Best Picture in an especially chaotic crowning, thanks to an apparent envelope mix-up that led Faye Dunaway to mistakenly announce La La Land as the winner.

But the entire evening was one for the books, rewarding a wide array of 2016’s best films (and Suicide Squad). So if you didn’t manage to watch all the nominees before the ceremony (or if you just want to watch them again), here’s how you can check out the films that took home Oscar gold on Sunday night.

Moonlight certainly isn’t the first underdog film to pull off a surprise win. But after the chaos of last night’s Oscars finale, its (extremely deserved) win is now forever associated with the Great Envelope Scandal of 2017.

The shock and confusion caused by the question of which envelope was delivered and read onstage for the Best Picture award consumed viewers following along on the internet.

Hollywood’s annual awards season wrapped up this weekend with the 89th annual Academy Awards and one hell of a photo finish. But the dresses worn on the red carpet will live on forever, immortalized in a deluge of best-dressed lists.

At this time of year, it’s already tough to read any entertainment-related stories online without encountering a slideshow of celebrities in floor-sweeping swaths of sequins and lace. But the film industry’s most prestigious show tends to inspire big fashion gestures among Hollywood’s elite, resulting in the juiciest best-dressed lists of all.

Like most of the major award shows, the Oscars offer fashion with a decided tendency away from “let’s get FASHIONY” and toward “this is a pretty and unremarkable dress/tux!”

But of all the “this is a pretty dress” award shows, the Oscars give us the most entertaining fashion. In the era of the best-dressed list, no one wants to take major risks or do anything as daring as, say, Bjork’s swan dress (now in the MoMA, FYI), but everyone’s stylists save their most elaborately beautiful gowns for the Oscars, a.k.a. Hollywood Prom. Nothing is too surprising, but a lot of things are beautiful.

The story of the Oscars this year won’t be written in terms of the Best Picture winner — Moonlight — or the biggest trophy gatherer, La La Land. It won’t be written in terms of host Jimmy Kimmel or memorable speeches. (Honestly, for a year when many were expecting a nonstop assault on the Donald Trump administration, à la the SAG Awards, the speeches were mostly tepid, Viola Davis notwithstanding.)

No, the story of the Oscars this year came in the final moments, when the biggest award of the night, Best Picture, briefly went to the wrong movie, before everybody involved realized the mistake and had to correct it in occasionally embarrassing fashion.

The 2017 Oscars had everything: delightful moments, predictable wins, notable firsts, and, as the viewing audience saw play out on live television, one major surprise milestone. La La Land — the most nominated film of the evening and the Best Picture frontrunner — not only suffered a major upset by losing Best Picture to Moonlight, but its producers experienced a whirlwind rush of emotions live onstage as the film was mistakenly announced as the winner. And in the process, it set not one but two instantly notorious records for itself.

But many other Oscar wins were significant in other ways — like a 21-time nominee finally taking home his first statuette, and a record number of wins going to black nominees.

There was a major upset at the Oscars on Sunday night — in more ways than one. The favorite to win the night’s big prize, La La Land, held the title of Best Picture for about 45 seconds. Presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced that the musical had won, and then, in a shocking turn of events, the producers accepting the award suddenly stopped their acceptance speech and revealed that Moonlight had actually won.

“We lost, by the way,” one of the producers said into the microphone before trailing off, amid growing confusion on the stage and in the audience.

La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s colorful musical and bittersweet love story, was expected to win the Oscars’ most prestigious prize, the Best Picture trophy, fulfilling its long-predicted destiny and overcoming the inevitable backlash it faced as awards season wore on.

But it didn’t win (though it won six other awards). In the strangest event most of us have seen in an Oscars broadcast, presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway read the wrong card, and the La La Land producers were mostly through their speech before the Oscars’ producers realized the error.

For a brief moment, the 2017 Oscars belonged to La La Land, and then, at the last minute, Moonlight ended up winning Best Picture. In short: La La Land was erroneously announced as the Best Picture winner, and after a few abruptly truncated speeches and general confusion, Moonlight, the true recipient, was then announced as the winner.

That shocking moment will be the most memorable thing about the 89th Academy Awards. But La La Land didn’t go home empty-handed. In fact, it was the night’s biggest winner, taking home six awards, including Best Director and Best Actress.

This is a developing story.

The 40-minute documentary The White Helmets won the Oscar for Documentary Short on February 26, but two of the film’s subjects — one of whom also served as one of its three cinematographers — weren’t at the ceremony in Los Angeles.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi just won his second Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for The Salesman — but as an act of protest against President Trump’s executive order banning people from seven majority-Muslim countries, and nearly all refugees, from entering the United States, he wasn’t at the ceremony to accept the award.

As Farhadi told the New York Times in a statement when Trump first signed the order in late January, he decided not to attend even if he could be granted an exception, saying it “now seems that the possibility of this presence is being accompanied by ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip.”

Viola Davis won her first Oscar on Sunday, taking home the Best Supporting Actress trophy for her performance as Rose Maxson in Fences. The movie is an adaptation of a play by August Wilson, and in Davis’s speech she honored the playwright’s dedication to bringing out the humanity of life. Wilson died in 2005.

“You know, there’s one place that all the people with the greatest potential are gathered — one place, and that’s the graveyard,” Davis said. She continued:

Heading into Oscar night, Kevin O’Connell, sound mixer extraordinaire, was the living human being with the most Oscar nominations without a win. He had been nominated for “best sound mixing” or its predecessor “best sound” 21 times, first in 1984 for Terms of Endearment and this year for Hacksaw Ridge.

And yet he had never won. Through Top Gun and Transformers and Spider-Man 2. Through movies that had won the other sound category — sound editing — but not sound mixing, even though the two often go hand in hand.

For his 2017 Oscars monologue, Jimmy Kimmel stuck to the basics.

Though many awards show hosts like to kick off their shows with a pretaped bit and/or musical number — like Jimmy Fallon did at the Golden Globes in January — that’s not exactly in line with Kimmel’s dry style. So instead, he let Justin Timberlake open the show with a splashy performance of “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” his Oscar-nominated song from Trolls (aren’t movies magical?), before walking onto the Oscars stage and delivering a brief monologue that would’ve been right at home during an episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!

As Emma Stone made the rounds on the Oscars red carpet as the favorite to win Best Actress for her performance in La La Land, she returned one more time to her favorite interview anecdote: the story of how, when she was 15 years old, she made a PowerPoint presentation to convince her parents to let her leave school and go to Hollywood.

As I’ve written before, that story has been Stone’s go-to since before she was famous. The earliest iteration I could find is from 2009, when she shared it during the Zombieland press tour, before she landed her first starring role in Easy A. Even then, the story was a known quantity: The interviewer had heard it before, and he wanted to confirm it.