To celebrate this year’s Academy Awards, I decided to have a Best Picture nominee movie marathon the night before the show and one of the movies I had the pleasure to watch was Moonlight. This movie floored me while my parents, who experienced the movie with me, did not enjoy it at all and preferred for a movie like La La Land to win Best Picture.

There are a couple of reasons why Moonlight is of high caliber and worthy of its Best Picture award that many people do not see:

• The acting — The acting in this movie is essentially flawless. The problem with the majority of movies nowadays is that they include characters in the story that do nothing for the story as a whole and essentially waste the character entirely. For example, the newest of the Divergent movies, the marketing of major actors is one of the reasons the movie sold despite it’s dreadfully written script and numerous flaws. In movies and stories, characters are added to the story for specific reasons but are there to add to the plot, but may movies fail at which and add characters just for the sake of adding a widely known name to the poster with the hope of a higher box office return. The use of lesser known actors in Moonlight makes the revenue and popularity of the movie more substantial, proving that the use of brand name actors isn’t always needed.
• The editing — This movie is perfectly edited to where every single shot and scene is placed in the perfect spot in the movie and is explained later in the story. One fault that most movies come across is that they edit the movie such a way that certain questions and plot elements are never explained. That is what most movies falter to while Moonlight uses every scene to the director’s advantage and answers every question the audience may have. There are certain scenes in this movie that leave the audience with questions as to why it is in the final cut of the movie, but these scenes are later explained and done to perfection.
• The cinematography — This movie is crowded with ominous lights of various colors and several slow motion shots that create the right amount of tension in the movie. The production design and every shot is immaculate and captivates the audience throughout the entire run time.

Moonlight is a completely revolutionary movie with its constant themes about adolescence in a harsh environment and finding oneself, so I would have to give this movie 5/5 stars.