After #OscarsSoWhite, all would be forgiven for being surprised Moonlight won. La La Land being upset, at this particular moment, by a movie about a young black man coming to terms with his sexuality, seemed as likely as-well, a woman getting elected president. Moonlight was a critical darling, but the movie about good-looking white kids making it in LA-the film that got the half-joking nickname 'Hollywood Handjob'-seemed like a shoo-in. Ever since the Golden Globes, La La Land has been the Best Picture favorite.

Yet it was that very unpredictability that made *Moonlight'*s win such an amazing outcome. And 'watching yet another sure victory dissolve into defeat,' he wrote, 'contributed to a sense that the world is fundamentally lawless and unpredictable.' The Patriots came back from a historically large deficit to beat The Falcons and win the Super Bowl.

As my colleague Jason Tanz pointed out recently, society has gotten awfully used to unexpected outcomes.

Below us, Jenkins was accepting the award, but we could barely hear him thanks to the chorus of 'oh my god's and 'what the hell's echoing around us. 'WHAT?' 'WHAT?' 'WHAT?' People filled the aisles all over again- this time to run to the edge of the balcony we were seated in, as if getting 15 feet closer would erase any plausible deniability. (When Jenkins thanked A24 publicist Heather Secrist during his speech, this was the section that whooped in support.) The suited-up young man repeated himself three or four more times. Behind me, I heard an audible and strained 'WHAT?' coming from what had been the cheering section for A24, the film's studio. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins and his crew headed to the stage. Due to some sort of envelope mixup, Warren Beatty had walked out onstage not with the Best Picture winner envelope, but with a duplicate of the Best Actress envelope-and, seeing Emma Stone's name next to the title La La Land, he and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner. Moonlight, you guys won best picture.' The entire Dolby Theater gasped in unison people couldn't tell if it was an Adele-dedicating-her-Grammy-to-Beyoncé bit of reverence, a joke, or both. La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz interrupted his own acceptance speech to announce the news: 'There's a mistake. What they missed, of course-what I saw from my seat in the theater, and what people watching at home saw as well-was the biggest upset in Oscars history. (Anyone who saw the first 10 minutes of La La knows that.) Writer-director Damien Chazelle's modern musical winning had seemed like a forgone conclusion to begin with why waste valuable party time watching the inevitable? This is Los Angeles, after all, and even in the City of Stars, traffic is always a concern. As soon as Faye Dunaway announced that La La Land was the Best Picture winner during last night's Academy Awards ceremony, people began filing out of their seats.

Oscar best picture