There's a secret club operating under a cloak of darkness in Hollywood. A club whose members would do anything to keep their identities under wraps. A club that operates in back alleys and basements, conducting its business through caged whispers and hand signals.
These are the People Who Don't Like La La Land.
At first they were few and far between. When the movie stormed the scene, brimming with award season potential and the overwhelming charm of Ryan Gosling, it was pure industry blasphemy to even think that it might be a little bit over-the-top. No excuse was valid: Who cares if you hate musicals? This is a movie for people who don't like musicals! Who cares if you don't like jazz? This is a movie that brings jazz to a new audience! Prefer New York to Los Angeles? Just try and argue against those sunsets. And then there's the Prius bit—this movie is so self-aware that even the Los Angeles love story doesn't have to be a Los Angeles love story.
Then the Golden Globes happened, and anyone who was wondering whether they were alone in their suspicion of the film received an answer of a resounding yes. Yes, you are literally the only person who doesn't like La La Land.
Gosling and his cronies-in-tap-dance Emma Stone and Damien Chazelle swept the event, winning all seven categories in which it was nominated. The event was all La La Land all the time, from the red carpet (Emma's star dress!) to their top-notch acceptance speeches (Ryan's tearjerker!) to the perfectly GIF-able three-way hug between Stone, Chazelle and his girlfriend. For days afterward, the musical was all anybody could talk about. That and the inner-costar love affair that went down, rivaling the great Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
But all the while, the inner monologues of the silently suffering continued. Am I crazy? It feels like I'm crazy, they said. How could a person not be totally, head-over-heels in love with a movie that just managed to score 14 Oscar nominations? How could a person even question the excellence of a piece of art that just tied the record set by the G-D Titanic?
Next came the SAG Awards, at which the movie went one-for-two on its nominations, with Stone winning and Gosling losing out to Denzel Washington. That was followed up by the BAFTAs, which approximately no one watched because of its unfortunate scheduling during Grammys weekend, but awarded La La Land with the accolades of Best Film, Best Leading Actress and the David Lean Award for Direction, among others.
In other words, the flick is on an award show roll. It's cleaning up. It's in the zone. It's at the top of its game. But none of that really matters—all anyone will remember is what happens this Sunday.
La La Land is widely considered to be the front runner for Best Picture at this weekend's Oscars. The odds are also ever in Ryan and Emma's favor. But it's hard to ignore the movies that are nipping at its heels.
First and foremost is Moonlight. While La La Land is on Oscar voter's dream, all self-congratulation and beautiful camerawork and Ryan Freaking Gosling, Moonlight speaks to an issue and a zeitgeist that couldn't be more prudent and important today. It's a movie that means something, and combined with star Mahershala Ali's powerful and endearing speech at the SAG Awards, it's a force to be reckoned with. Special attention should also be paid to Hidden Figures, which won the top prize at the SAG Awards, and boasts awards darlings Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer.
And the team behind La La Land would be remiss if they didn't have their eyes on the diversity issue. Last year was a new low for the Academy Awards, with the lack of representation at an astonishing level. The 2017 nominations made big strides in actually looking somewhat like the makeup of the rest of America, and awarding a bulk of the Oscar statues to a movie that stars almost exclusively white actors could be seen as a big step backwards.
And then, of course, there are the naysayers. Thanks to the growing conversation around representation in Hollywood, the wins by La La Land's competitors and a very on-the-nose Saturday Night Live sketch, they're starting to come out of the woodwork. Even The New York Times, that great bastion of highbrow culture, recently went public with the concerns of a few staff members and arguments like "It doesn't understand musicals" and "man, does it annoy me" and "If playing an awesome synth solo is wrong, I don't want to be right."
Bolstered by these rumblings, regular people have felt empowered to speak out. This writer, in particular, can attest being on the receiving end of several testimonies about acquaintance's inability to "get" the movie. Give a person a few glasses of wine and suddenly they've all sorts of questions about why Emma Stone's character is such a snob or why they constantly insist on tap dancing. Dare you inform the person that tap dancing is what they do in musicals. They have their opinion and they're sticking with it.
Will the secret society unearth itself fully to topple La La Land's reign? Or will Old Hollywood dominated New Hollywood? We'll have to wait until Oscar Sunday to find out.