It's a really nice piece actually.<p>I have to confess I've never seen Moonlight, but it's probably at the top of my list of recent films to see. I just haven't had time to watch anything lately.<p>My one comment is that I think the phenomenon being observed isn't unique to racism or Moonlight or films--I think it's related to a work having a narrow audience and then that audience widening. The observation that "as Moonlight’s acclaim grew, the film’s release widened from 650 theaters (November 18) to 1564 (post-Oscars)" is important.<p>I've noticed this with blu-rays and books on Amazon as well. I've seen this with certain technical books a lot; initially they are highly rated, and then as word of mouth spreads, and they get introduced as textbooks, and people start mistaking them as introductions to a topic, you start seeing people get frustrated that they aren't what they were looking for, even though the problem is the book was never for them to begin with. I suspect there is something unique about Moonlight, vis-a-vis racism and concerns about "reverse racism" at the Oscars (which in its strict form is undermined by the high critic ratings--you'd have to argue the white guilt extends to critics, who I don't think experienced any change in that one way or another over recent years), but I also think something about going from niche to widely viewed also is relevant.<p>It would be interesting to compare Moonlight's ratings to other films that had big increases in distribution in a short time, especially those that went from arthouse to widespread distribution. My guess is you would see similar phenomena.<p>I'm familiar with how to do analyses to examine bias, etc. and as far as I know IMDb doesn't have the fine-grained level of ratings you'd need. For example, you'd want to show that somehow more specific subratings and their relationships with some overall rating changes.<p>There is rating by demographic, and it would be interesting to see how that might have changed over time--for example, if the demographic groups doing the ratings changed, or if the relationship between demographic and rating changed. I don't think IMDb gives that kind of fine-grained detail.<p>You could go over the top as much as you want, though--doing topic analysis of written reviews over time, etc.