Why The Oscars Still Matter

Anger, fear, political upheaval — for many, it’s tough to get emotional over who wins best supporting actor. But as 21 artists, thinkers and public figures testify here, the Academy Awards can be an inspiration to a kid ‘seeing myself in this world’ and to everyone from moguls to Matt Damon to Hamilton creator and first-time nominee Lin-Manuel Miranda (for Moana), who shares his lifelong fascination with Hollywood’s biggest night

- Frank Digiacomo

During college, Lin-Manuel Miranda and a friend used to improvise interpretative dance tributes to best picture nominees at their annual Oscar party. “It was a lot of breathing and rolling around,” recalls the creator of the Broadway smash Hamilton. “We had a great Seabiscuit dance one year.”

For the New York-born son of Puerto Rican parents — his father a political consultant, his mother a psychologist — it was just another phase of a lifelong fascination with the Oscars that began when he was growing up in the Inwood section of Manhattan, playing and replaying the telecasts that his family recorded on their VCR. At 37, Miranda is about to cross the threshold from superfan to participant: “How Far I’ll Go,” which he wrote for the Disney film Moana, is nominated for original song, and on Feb. 26, Miranda (with his mother) will attend his first Academy Awards. It’s an auspicious step in a career that will see him star with Emily Blunt and Colin Firth in Disney’s 2018 Mary Poppins Returns and collaborate with composer Alan Menken on the studio’s live-action The Little Mermaid, one of Miranda’s favorite films and, he reveals here, the gateway to his Oscars obsession.

My brain is a compendium of Oscar moments: Tom Hanks’ beautiful acceptance speech when he won best actor for Philadelphia in 1994. Roberto Benigni climbing over chairs and wanting to make love to everybody in the world when Life Is Beautiful won best foreign-language film in 1999. Kim Basinger presenting in 1990 and telling the audience that one of the best films of the year, Do the Right Thing, was not nominated. For her to take a stand, 25 years before #OscarsSoWhite, was incredible — and impressive because time has shown the prescience of that film.