Bloch functions and Bekolle-Bonami weights

We study analogues of well-known relationships between Muckenhoupt weights and $BMO$ in the setting of Bekolle-Bonami weights. For Bekolle-Bonami weights of bounded hyperbolic oscillation, we provide distance formulas of Garnett and Jones-type, in the context of $BMO$ on the unit disc and hyperbolic Lipschitz functions. This leads to a characterization of all weights in this class, for which any power of the weight is a Bekolle-Bonami weight, which in particular reveals an intimate connection between Bekolle-Bonami weights and Bloch functions. On the open problem of characterizing the closure of bounded analytic functions in the Bloch space, we provide a counter-example to a related recent conjecture. This shed light into the difficulty of preserving harmonicity in approximation problems in norms equivalent to the Bloch norm. Finally, we apply our results to study certain spectral properties of Cesaro operators.