la la land

The Oscars have long had surprising moments, but Sunday night just gave us the most insane moment in Academy Awards history. Moonlight won Best Picture, but only after presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly named La La Land the winner.

Ah, can you smell it? The aroma of scorching hot awards season debates is already in the air! The nominees for the 2017 Oscars were announced bright and early this morning – or should we say dark and early, as the ScreenCrush team beat the sunrise for the big announcement.

The musical never completely died as a movie genre, but it did lay dormant for a good long while throughout the 1980s and ’90s, with only the occasional throwback like Pennies From Heaven, Newsies, or Everyone Says I Love You popping up, like an old memory. Back then, the movie business largely conceded its tradition of song-and-dance to Disney cartoons and MTV, assuming — wrongly — that the idea of flesh-and-blood actors breaking into big numbers in the middle of narrative feature films had become too cornball for the modern mass audience.

As December rolls on, so too does the cavalcade of year-end lists. The latest authority to weigh in is AFI, by which I mean the American Film Institute and not the Californian alternative-rock group also known as A Fire Inside. While we may never know which films the quartet behind “Miss Murder” favored this year, the other AFI has released their list of 2016’s ten best releases, and it’s a little more varied than some of the heretofore published lists, bringing in some films with less awards buzz along with your usual suspects of Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and La La Land.

Ready or not, awards season has arrived, which means you’ll hear be hearing nothing but Oscars talk for the next two months. The awards season is already a big question mark for a few frontrunners. Earlier this week Moonlight swept the Gotham Awards, Manchester By the Sea dominated the National Board of Review’s winners list, and La La Land earned 12 noms for the Critics’ Choice Awards. It’s safe to say this will be a very competitive Oscar season, and lucky for you ScreenCrush has a brand new podcast to keep you up to date on all the awards season news.

Do you like music? How about romance? What about both of those amidst gorgeous sceneries? Then ‘La La Land’ will probably be your most anticipated movie of the year. If not, just watch the new teaser trailer for an express ticket to swoon city.