Moonlight is so, so overrated...

Personally, I felt the film to be pretentious. There's good cinematography and a good score, but using the score over silent dialogue doesn't make a good film.  There's nothing special about this story. There have been countless films like this throughout the years but they haven't gotten Academy attention.

It was a complete joke that Mahershala Ali won. There's no excuse for that. He gave a decent performance, but there's nothing Oscar about it. Case in point, if you were watching this movie the first day it was released, before you knew it'd eventually get Oscar buzz, you'd never walk out of the movie thinking, "oh that's an Oscar performance!" It would never cross your mind. It's like Chris Tucker winning Best Actor for Rush Hour - he was good in it.

IMO Mahershala Ali's performance as Juan/Blue was interchangeable with the other 2 adult male characters in the film: Kevin and Chiron being the others. You literally could've written drew any of the 2 names in hat, and nominated the one you picked. It was totally random, as if the Academy was thinking, "we have to nominate someone from this film, who should it be?"

In fact, after watching it, I thought the actor who played Adult Chiron did a good job, adopting the mannerisms as the actors who played his younger selves, that I thought maybe he was the one who had won, and had to look it up to be sure. 

This movie is totally, totally, overrated. Never thought the Oscars would cave to diversity for the sake of having diversity, when it's completely unearned. Removing all Academy bias, Manchester by the Sea or LaLa Land would have won.