• Mayor Pete Buttigieg did an interview with a country music radio show, but the radio network refused to air the interview. Link to Blair Garner's interview here.
• Pop star Ricky Martin has joined hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans in protests calling for the resignation of the island territory’s governor
• Organizers of the upcoming Straight Pride Parade got more cease and desist letters after illegally insinuating major corporations were sponsors
• Oscar-winning queer-themed film, Moonlight, was named the best film of the 2010 decade by Indiewire.
All that and more in this episode of The Randy Report.
Ashton Sanders and Jharrel Jerome, stars of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight received the award for Best Kiss at the MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday night.
The duo's kiss was nominated alongside Emma Stone's and Ryan Gosling's smooch in La La Land, Emma Watson's and Dan Stevens' kiss in Beauty and the Beast, Taraji P. Henson's and Terrence Howard's steamy moment in Empire and Zac Efron's and Anna Kendrick's kiss in Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates.
"I think it is safe to say that it is OK for us young performers, especially us minority performers, to step out of the box," Jerome said onstage.
This year's Oscar best picture depicts the story of Chiron as he goes through the different phases of his life while understanding his sexuality. The actor who plays Chiron's love interest throughout his childhood, adolescence and young adulthood is Jerome, who expressed the importance of this award going to a kiss between two gay men.
"This award is bigger than Jharrel and I. This represents more than a kiss, it represents those who feel like the others, the misfits, this represents us," Sanders said upon accepting their award.
• Fitness model Dmitry Averyanov (above) wishes you a Happy Friday!
• This year's Oscar-winning "Best Picture" Moonlight is playing out to more than 1,500 theaters this weekend, the widest distribution the indie flick has seen. In 20 weeks of release, the gorgeous, coming-of-age film has grossed about $22 million at the domestic box office.
• This out Asian man says he only dates white guys because they are "the gold standard of desirability." I find him "the gold standard of icky." It won't surprise you to find that, armed with that outlook, he hasn't found his soul mate yet...
• The suspect in the Key West hate crime against two gay men thinks he can avoid extradition from North Carolina. Umm, he was identified using a rented scooter with his drivers license. You're going down pal.
• The two accountants responsible for the red envelope mix up for "Best Picture" at this year's Academy Awards have been booted from working the event in the future.
• Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga and Pharrell are taking part in "The Love Project" for Revlon. The cosmetics company has committed $1 million to charities like The Born This Way Foundation, The Trevor Project, From One Hand to AnOTHER and The Women’s Heart Alliance. Watch the spot that ran during the Academy Awards below:
Initially, Academy Award winners Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner, but it appears they were handed the "Best Actress" envelope that named Emma Stone as "Best Actress."
Warren Beatty was confused looking at the envelope. Showing it to Faye Dunaway she saw La La Land, and so read that title.
But in the middle of acceptance speeches, it became clear the true winner of the "Best Picture" title was Moonlight.
I'm over the moon. This small, indie pic chronicling a young gay African-American boy's coming-of-age story was clearly an underdog in the Oscar race. I never in my dreams this gorgeous film would win "Best Picture."
In the end, Moonlight won a total of three Oscars - Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali. Watch Team Moonlight in the press room moments after the win, and the trailer for the film, below.
The Barry Jenkins drama Moonlight, up for Best Picture and a number of other categories at tonight’s Oscars, took home six Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday.
The coming-of-age flick picked up 6 awards: Best Film, Director (Barry Jenkins), Screenplay (Barry Jenkins, Story By Tarell Alvin McCraney), Cinematograpy (James Paxton), Editing (Joi McMillon, Nat Sanders), and the Robert Altman award (for best cast/casting).
Moonlight was my choice for Best Film of 2016. If you haven't seen it yet, you can rent it on iTunes here.
I took my husband, Michael, to see the brilliant Moonlight this afternoon because I needed him to understand why I'm so passionate about this moving "coming of age" film of a young gay black man in Florida.
And then, tonight, this beautiful, haunting little independent film won the Golden Globe Award for "Best Film - Drama."
More wine!!!
To see my past coverage of the film, click here and here and here.
• The brilliant indie film Moonlight received 6 Golden Globe nominations which means even more of the world will be exposed to one of the best movies I've ever seen. If you haven't seen it yet, GO!
• Politico is reporting that upwards of 20 GOP Electoral College members are considering not casting their votes for Donald Trump on December 19th. The most EC members to change their votes in one year was 6 in 1808.
• More from the Electoral College - 40 members have asked for an intelligence briefing before December 19th regarding information that Russia actively moved to help elect Donald Trump.
• Oklahoma lawmakers have approved a bill that would require businesses to post anti-abortion signs in their bathrooms.
• Following an acclaimed 4 night concert production at City Center this past October, Jake Gyllenhaal heads back to Broadway in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George for ten weeks at the Hudson Theater.
In reviewing the new movie Moonlight, The Advocate editor Yezmin Villarreal dubs the coming of age flick by director Barry Jenkins "the year's best film." Villarreal describes the film thusly:
"Moonlight — in theaters Friday — is a coming-of-age film about a gay black youth, Chiron, growing up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, which was affected by the rise of crack cocaine and the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Chiron is not only struggling with the boys at school who incessantly bully him but is also dealing with a drug-addicted mother and coming to terms with his attraction to men."
To describe “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s second feature, as a movie about growing up poor, black and gay would be accurate enough. It would also not be wrong to call it a movie about drug abuse, mass incarceration and school violence. But those classifications are also inadequate, so much as to be downright misleading. It would be truer to the mood and spirit of this breathtaking film to say that it’s about teaching a child to swim, about cooking a meal for an old friend, about the feeling of sand on skin and the sound of waves on a darkened beach, about first kisses and lingering regrets. Based on the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” by Tarell Alvin McCraney, “Moonlight” is both a disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.
Towleroad's Nathaniel Rogers is already calling for Oscar nominations:
Critics are saying it’s a rich original film about growing up gay and black. That’s true. The film will provoke many identity politics discussions, but it’s so much more than that. The director Barry Jenkins’ artistry is so strong that the film is universally relatable to the gay experience.
Moonlight is magic. So intimate you feel like you're trespassing on its characters’ souls, so transcendent it's made visual and emotional poetry out of intensely painful experience, it's a film that manages to be both achingly familiar and unlike anything we've seen before.
