La La Land, directed by Damien Chazelle, is the perfect Oscar movie. From the lavish design and style to the elaborate cinematography and choreography, the musical was made to reign at the Academy Awards. To the Academy voters, La La Land seems natural to get their vote, because it truly is a stunning piece of art. There’s the problem, though, behind all the beauty and awe, the Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling led picture is too much of an Oscar bait film to deserve its win.

Escapism is the main theme of La La Land and to sugarcoat it, the film doesn’t know it is the problem it’s trying to address. Watching it is stepping into a fantastical false reality, but after Justin Hurwitz’s eclectic score finally fades, La La Land is really just a huge commercial for Hollywood and Los Angeles. You have the grand intro scene on the crowded traffic-ridden LA highway that is a massive accomplishment of planning and camera work to the small moments of Ryan Gosling playing City of Stars on the piano. All these moments are impressively balanced, but the problem still remains, could any possibly exist?

The lesson that La La Land ultimately proclaims is that big dreams come with great sacrifice and the fools who dream should still chase them with hope. That idea of making your dreams into reality grips the majority of LA citizens and aspiring film personnel and the movie intimately portrays a couple stuck in this mindset. La La Land is stuck in la la land while the real Best Picture winner Moonlight was rooted in reality and deals with current societal problems. Moonlight’s lesson is that a person is built by the experiences and the prejudices he/she deals with, and this allowed La La Land to literally hand over their Oscars to Moonlight.

The movie is made of all these visual allusions and nods that the crew decided to throw in to further increase critical acclaim. The real issue with this is that La La Land shamelessly does this, and it does this way too well. The last 20 minutes or so is almost entirely comprised of these moments, and viewers are both overwhelmed and puzzled on why they exist.

La La Land is an amazing, ground-breaking and extravagant look at the city of stars, but Moonlight is real and happening in cities around the world. While Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling floating amidst the city’s stars is powerful and thematic, Chiron talking to his mother in the third act of Moonlight will twist your perception of the entire story.