You know, "Moonlight" deserves best picture [on Oscar]. What I mean by tarnished is the moment - being able to be in front of all your peers and being able to thank everyone involved and particularly when it's a movie that has some pivotal social relevance, like "Moonlight," particularly in a time where, with this new transitional government, LGBT rights are just being stripped. This win means something.

If you think about black art, all black art, whether it's Invisible Man or whether it's James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Hurston, or Richard Wright, they all deal with elements of identity and trying to humanize our experience and our struggle in the world where people have been indifferent to who we are and what we are. It's basically just saying that our lives have meaning.

That's one thing that you notice in New York that you don't notice in LA is how much music is all over the place.

I know now it's a hashtag and people have various feelings about it, but really if you look at all black art, even in hip-hop, it's all about that I exist and these are my feelings and this is what I feel about the world. It's always been an undercurrent.

If you're black living in the community and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.

The one thing you'll notice when you're walking through Harlem is every single passing car is playing different music and there's also music that's being played out of windows.

One picture and one win cannot right a million wrongs. It's a step in the right direction.We have to get to a point where a movie like "Moonlight" winning [Oscar] or Barry Jenkins being nominated and winning, you know, for a screenplay or being nominated for best director - that it's just commonplace. They shouldn't be a novelty.