Best Picture/Best Director Split: 2016 (CLOSED)

Moonlight over the slick, sanitized, forgettable musical. Nobody is going to remember songs from LLL in the way they remember the true classic musical soundtracks

I genuinely believe that there should be a full-on fantasy war movie musical. Base it in a civil war with people singing about their different beliefs in a horrifying clash of blood and steel.



Furthermore, there are many old folk songs that are set in war time and loss - High Germany, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, etc. - that have a lot of darkness to them, and which would make great songs in a musical.

But in the case of LLL, it has no bite whereas the best musicals *do* have that bite. The Secret Garden is practically a ghost story. Fiddler on the Roof is an examination of faith. West Side Story is about gang warfare. Wicked is about image and the politics of "popularity." Pippin is an existential nightmare about the meaning of life. The Sound of Music is set against the rise of the Nazis. Matilda is a portrait of child abuse and the scars it leaves on the adults who have survived it.

There *are* great musicals that are just light and fun... well, there's one anyway: Singin' in the Rain. (I'm also partial to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers because of that awesome dance choreography - not so much for the story.) The trouble is that LLL has no decent dance numbers, the songs are unmemorable, and the only thing it has going for it is that it reminds you of better movies from the 1950s.

In basically all those examples they still present themselves in glossy sanitized way even when dealing with something like stabbings in West Side Story or Nazis in The Sound of Music, you can dislike La La Land I don't care, but criticizing a musical for being sanitized seems a little like criticizing a kettle for being black given that musicals as a genre are 99% sanitized by their very nature. Even in a purposeful genre subversion like Pennies From Heaven, the musical numbers themselves are still presented in an extremely glossy way, and purposefully sanitizes its ending to play into the expectations of the genre. 

I fundamentally disagree that musicals are "glossy" by their nature. They are glossy because that is how we have been trained to perceive them. Is Die Nibelung glossy? (Serious question, I don't know. ) If we get a musical war movie with heavy bloodshed, would that necessarily be glossy? LLL appeals to the old-fashioned musicals of a bygone era (but not as good), and that's all I meant to say with my original post... but there is a great deal of depth to be mined from the musical medium (I hesitate to even call it a genre.) I'm waiting for my U.S. Civil War musical epic full of angst and sadness, Hollywood!

Moonlight by a mile

Very close for me, as they're pretty much right next to each other in my top ten of that year, but I slightly prefer La La Land.

I will fundamentally disagree with the perception idea, as you can look at the majority, 99% of musicals are glossy in the way they approach their material, making it the standard for the genre and anything that isn't within that standard is seen as a subversion. For example, Dancer in the Dark is a purposeful subversion of the musical genre as a musical that is extremely tragic and presented without a bit of gloss, however that would be described  as a subversion of the genre. The reason for this isn't hard to navigate, and it is something that developed beyond Opera, technically the musicals before the musicals which also were often tragic, but that was from the stage where the ideas of singing come off very differently than on film. On film singing as just part of life is a clear break in the typical idea of "suspension of disbelief" because no one does that in reality, leading to the majority of musicals being presented in a way that embrace that non-reality by doing so in some form of sanitized stylized reality. Even the closest film I can think of to your desired bloody war musical, Oh What a Lovely War, is also a subversion of the genre expectation, however it presents moments with a degree of that surface "glamour"/gloss, and subverts that to always alluding to a dark underbelly of the truth of what is going on during WWI, letting the musical scenes fit the genre, while alluding to the truth of the matter beneath that surface. That film even though is still playing with the sanitized expectation of the musical as a genre as the surface dressing, even if it is dealing with decidedly non-sanitized subject matter.