It's 'La La Land.' No, 'Moonlight.'

Oscar's biggest screw-up ever? Probably.

Normally, I'd be writing something about how host Jimmy Kimmel, after a fine start, teetered as the evening wore on. I might say that I was a bit surprised that Denzel Washington (Fences) lost the best actor award to Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea). I also might have said that Viola Davis' heartfelt acceptance speech for best supporting actress was the highlight of an evening that became boring despite Kimmel's attempts at originality -- dropping candy from the rafters and bringing a tour bus full of unsuspecting gawkers onto the Oscar stage.

I also might have said that I got real tired of Kimmel's running gags about his feud with Matt Damon.

Had things gone the way they should have, I would have cheered Moonlight's victory over frontrunner La La Land for best picture.

I know. I still can't believe it, either. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who once starred as Bonnie and Clyde, stole all the Oscar thunder by announcing the wrong movie for best picture. During a La La Land acceptance speech, we learned that Moonlight -- not La La Land -- actually had won. It fell to Jordan Horowitz, a La La Land producer, to utter words that probably will haunt him for the rest of his life, "There's a mistake. ... This is not a joke, Moonlight has won best picture."

Warren Beatty lamely tried to explain what happened, something about the best actress card being in the best picture envelope. It didn't really help.

So what should have been a great night for those of us who preferred Moonlight to La La Land left a very sour taste. How could anyone not feel sorry for the folks who made La La Land? They had statues in hand -- and gracefully surrendered them to the Moonlight crew.

You'll read a lot more about this monumental screw-up, but on a night when we should be celebrating the work of Mahershala Ali, who won best supporting actor for his performance as a crack dealer with a heart in Moonlight and when we should be wondering how Suicide Squad won anything (it landed the Oscar for makeup and hairstyling), we're stuck with the most embarrassing ending to an awards program in the history of awards programs.

So I'm cashing in my chips for the evening. Maybe I'll return to Oscar tomorrow, but I'm no longer in the mood to eke some social significance out the evening, which included the expected jabs at the current administration and calls for inclusion.

Instead, I'll leave you by quoting a tweet from James Poniewozik, a TV critic for the New York Times.

"Looking forward to tomorrow morning, by which time the Oscar winner for best picture will be Hidden Figures," Poniewozik wrote.

All I can say is, "Dunaway and Beatty gave us something to talk about, but damn."

My 10 best movies of the year

It's always tempting to sum up the year in movies with a single word: "bad" or "good." Of course, every movie year includes abundant examples of both, and no 10-best list can -- or should -- be taken as the ultimate statement about anything. For me, the point of making such a list is to remember the year and honor the films that offered me stimulation, provocation and pleasure.

Of course, no list can be inclusive: I had fun at a movie such as Dr. Strange, but you won't find it among my absolute favorites. Same goes for parts of Sausage Party, a ribald bit of animation.

I also suffered through plenty of movies, but there's no need to rehash the year's disappointments here.

Looking forward isn't easy. Movies don't develop instantly, and it will be a while before we know how the Trump years influence what we're watching.

In the meantime, I offer my list in hopes that you'll make your own, and with a wish that you and yours enjoy a happy and healthy 2017.

1. Moonlight

Watching a young black man struggle to find his voice at three different stages of his life proved both instructive and stirring. Chiron, the movie's main character, doesn't say much, but director Barry Jenkins brings insight and small moments of grace to a story that's tough and tender in equal measure.

2. Manchester by the Sea

Director Kenneth Lonergan obtains a great performance from Casey Affleck as a young man carrying a tremendous burden of guilt and shame. At the same time, Longergan finds humor in characters who are deeply embedded in their Massachusetts milieu. A profoundly sad movie about how one man deals (or doesn't) with an unbearable past.

3. Arrival

Director Denis Villeneuve had the courage to make a sci-fi movie about the mind-bending effects of language, a heady theme presented with a welcome lack of apocalyptic special effects -- amazing considering that the movie involves the arrival of aliens on Earth. Amy Adams gives a fine performance as a linguist who needs to learn a whole new system of communicating.

4. The Handmaiden

Korean director Park Chan-wook's elegant masterwork, like some of his previous movies (Old Boy and Lady Vengeance) benefits from the perverse breezes that waft through the story in ways that spur Park's considerable imagination. This beautiful period piece takes place in Korea in the 1930s, but the sensibility is all Park's. The story kicks off when a con man hires a young woman to become the maid of an heiress. He hopes to steal her inheritance. The rest should be discovered in a theater.

5. The Fits

An 11-year-old (Royalty Hightower) at a Cincinnati recreation center attempts to choose between the world of boxing and the world of competitive drill. Director Anna Rose Holmer's movie mixes ambiguity and specificity in ways that prove haunting. Holmer brings a distinctive and welcome new voice to the movie scene.

6. 13th, OJ: Made in America and I'm Not Your Negro

A revealing search for identity

Tender and tough, Moonlight stays with you.

To understand Chiron, the main character in director Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, it might be helpful to understand what this young man -- shown at three different stages of his life and played by three different actors -- doesn't have.

No father guides Chiron; his crack-addicted, single mom offers no real parental support; no group of friends provides companionship; and no protector helps keep the neighborhood bullies at bay.

Such observations make Chiron sound like a sociological statistic, a black kid suffering the deprivations of an impoverished life in Miami's ironically named Liberty City. Although Chiron's deprivations constitute a valid and appropriate description, they don't go far enough.

The most important thing that Chiron lacks is a voice. What makes Jenkins's movie impressive are the ways in which he has coaxed the actors who play Chiron to be expressive without articulating the myriad contradictory feelings that whirl inside the character's head. Chiron seldom speaks.

You can (and probably should) spend time unpacking the various complex meanings in Jenkins's movie: the drug dealer who becomes a genuine father figure in Chiron's life but who, because he sells drugs to Chiron's mother, is pained by his own hypocrisy; Chiron's discovery of his gayness; or the multiplicity of causes leading to the violent explosion that criminalizes Chiron and redirects his life.

All of those things are worth discussing, but Chiron's voicelessness underlies everything worth thinking about in Moonlight.

And by voice, I don't mean only the act of speaking. I mean Chiron's ability to define an identity that's unshackled from environment and circumstance.

In the movie's first section, we meet the youngest version of Chiron, as played by Alex Hibbert. A slight kid who has been issued the nickname "Little," Chiron clearly is an outsider.

In this section, Chiron encounters Juan (a terrific Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who takes the boy under wing.

Born in Cuba, Juan sincerely cares about Chiron. Scenes in which he teaches Chiron to swim give Jenkins an opportunity to display a tender, lovely touch.

Not surprisingly, Juan's concerns land him in a territorial fight with Chiron's mother, a walking fury of woman portrayed by Naomie Harris.

When Chiron reaches his teen years, Ashton Sanders takes over the role. Of the three actors who portray Chiron, Sanders has the least physical resemblance to the others, but his acting leaves no doubt about the adolescent Chiron's connection to his boyhood self: his watchfulness, his ability to ask penetrating questions, his loneliness.

In this period, Chiron has his first sexual experience, and again tries to escape bullies. He hides from his tormentors until an irrepressible anger breaks through his muted surface.

Trevante Rhodes takes over the role when Chiron becomes an adult. By this time, Chiron has survived a stint in juvenile prison; he has bulked up, perhaps to armor himself against the world and against his own feelings. He's also living a life that mirrors the life lived by Juan.

I don't know if it's acting or physical resemblance or a combination of the two, but as this segment evolves, Rhodes reveals more and more traces of the Chiron we knew as a child.

Eventually, Chiron reconnects with a friend from childhood (Andre Holland), a reunion that leads to the movie's conclusion -- which feels like a well-earned respite from all the previous tensions, if not a triumphant moment of self-realization.

Whether you see Moonlight as a perfect movie or not, it's difficult to imagine that you won't be moved by the way Jenkins interprets and reimagines Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.

It's not easy to make a movie in which the main character is less actor than one who's acted upon, less talker than one who is talked at, but Jenkins creates a richly realized world and moves us through it with insight and small moments of grace.