A few thoughts on the other side of last night’s Academy Awards. Moonlight, my favorite film of the year, remarkably got most of the honor it deserved. Remarkable because over the last 20 years or so, the Academy Awards and I have increasingly parted ways regarding quality cinema.

This morning I pondered exactly what it was about Moonlight that was so deeply satisfying. My answer—and yours most likely will differ—is that the film represents a near-perfect meshing of dialogue with the visual. Put another way, it is a breathtaking example of the writing axiom “Show, don’t tell”—a dictate that, weirdly, is often ignored in mainstream filmmaking.

You can’t just listen to Moonlight to appreciate it, nor can you just settle back and watch it. It seems so simple, doesn’t? Mainstream film as the equal meeting, contrasting and melding of words and images. So why does it happen so infrequently?

Way too often—even now in the early 21st century—what mainstream movies are serving up is either an illustrated radio drama or compositions with with discrete commentary, as if we’ve opted for the audio tour of an art exhibition.

I’m looking at you, Aaron Sorkin—and you, too, Terrence Malick.

Sorkin personifies the exposition-as-dialogue school of film. His characters have no inner life, only a series of nonstop monologues about what’s they’re thinking and what that may mean for you, the other characters and them. And when they’re not talking about themselves, they’re opining on the metaphoric significance of their situations.

Malick quite simply wants to be a painter—and that’s very cool, except that he’s a filmmaker. Take Sorkin, turn him inside out, and you’ve got Malick.

In retrospect, this explains much of my hatred of superhero movies and the films of Woody Allen: For me, both are the worst of cinematic worlds—exposition-as-dialogue surrounded by singleminded and clinically astonishing and / or pretty visuals. Blatancy inside of blatancy, like the motion picture equivalent of Russian dolls.

Moonlight, on the other hand, got the balance exactly right. Evocative, dialogue by characters struggling to in some way articulate what’s going on in their heads met cinematography that wordlessly deepened the narrative even as it helped advance it. And thus Moonlight was robbed when La La Land won the Oscar for best cinematography because the visuals of La La Land were Prettified Blatancy, even in the context of film musicals—and most especially when compared to the roving, observing camerawork in Moonlight.

But on the other hand, Moonlight taking home the best picture Oscar has given me a tiny bit of hope that maybe, fingers crossed, Hollywood’s implacable desire to replicate successes will look beyond the coming-of-age take or even the African-American cinema peg and understand that the perfect meshing of dialogue and visuals is the main source of the film’s greatness.