Guillermo del Toro’s outcast fantasy wins best picture in a ceremony that called for more representation and female empowerment in Hollywood
A battle cry for inclusion: The Shape of Water triumphs in Oscars of seismic change
The Shape of Water, a romantic fable about a janitor who falls in love with a sea creature, has swept top honours at the Oscars in a ceremony that turned into a battle cry for inclusion and female empowerment.
Guillermo del Toro’s cold war-era fantasy about the triumph of outcasts fended off the satirical horror Get Out and the drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, to take best picture and director, continuing a winning streak for Mexican film-makers in Hollywood.
The 90th Academy Awards turned Sunday night’s ceremony in Los Angeles into a celebration and exhortation of representation and inclusion, after a year marked by seismic cultural change in Hollywood that rippled across the world.
Play Video 1:05 'Stand with me': Frances McDormand gets every female Oscar nominee on their feet – video
Frances McDormand, who won the best actress award for playing a grieving, furious mother in Three Billboards, created one of the night’s most memorable tableaux by asking all the female nominees in the Dolby theatre to stand up. “Look around,” she said. “We all have stories to tell and projects we need financing.”
She finished her speech saying: “I have two words to say: inclusion rider”, a reference to a little known contract clause that lets actors demand diversity on both sides of the camera. Backstage, she stressed this is a new era. “We’re not going back. It changes now ... power in rules.”
Helen Mirren on a jet ski and BB8 backstage: Oscars 2018 highlights – in pictures Read more
The acting awards went as expected. Gary Oldman won best actor for depicting Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. “Put the kettle on,” he told his 99-year-old mother, watching on the sofa at home. “I’m bringing Oscar home.”
Sam Rockwell won best supporting actor for playing a racist cop in Three Billboards and Allison Janney won best supporting actress for playing an unforgiving mother in I, Tonya.
Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed coming of age story Lady Bird and Steven Spielberg’s The Post left empty-handed, though Jordan Peele’s Get Out won best original screenplay, prompting a rapturous standing ovation that cemented his elevation to Hollywood’s elite. Christopher Nolan’s war epic Dunkirk and Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark romance Phantom Thread took a clutch of technical awards.
James Ivory, 89, became the oldest winner of an Oscar for the gay coming of age drama Call Me by Your Name, in the best adapted screenplay category.
A crystal stage, clips of classic films and appearances by veteran stars projected a nostalgic glow, but the ceremony crackled with contemporary politics and social activism related to sexual misconduct and immigration rights.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra and Salma Hayek. Photograph: Craig Sjodin/Getty Images
Salma Hayek, Ashley Judd and Annabella Sciorra, who went public with allegations of sexual misconduct against the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, jointly presented an emotional montage that channelled the anger and hope of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. The movement’s leaders had decided to stand down for the night, in contrast to the Golden Globes, whose attendees expressed solidarity by wearing black, but Hollywood’s mood of reckoning still permeated proceedings.
Along with jewellery, the traditional gift bags for top nominees included pepper spray and a “phobia-relief” therapy session. On the red carpet, most stars shunned the E! News presenter Ryan Seacrest because of sexual harassment accusations, which he denies.
The host, Jimmy Kimmel, joked in the opening monologue that the Oscar statue set an example for Hollywood: “He keeps his hands where you can see them, never says a rude word, and literally doesn’t have a penis.” This was the year that men screwed up so badly “women started dating fish”, he said, referencing The Shape of Water.
Kimmel also addressed last year’s fiasco, when the wrong best picture was announced. “This year, when you hear your name called, don’t get up right away,” he told the audience. “Give us a minute.”
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who initially, incorrectly announced La La Land instead of Moonlight the winner last year, surprisingly returned to present the best picture award – this time without a hitch.
Del Toro’s victory was the fourth time a Mexican director has taken Oscar honours in the last five years, following Alfonso Cuarón in 2014 and Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2015 and 2016.
“I am an immigrant,” said Del Toro in a veiled rebuke to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. “The greatest thing art does and our industry does is erase the lands in the sand. We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.”
Backstage, the director said artists have to honour their roots and said he would be bringing his statues to his parents in Mexico. “I’m going home with these two babies.”
Play Video 0:35 'Representation matters': Coco director thanks the people of Mexico – video
Coco, about a Mexican boy’s journey to the underworld, won best animated film and best original song, prompting cries of “Viva Mexico” from the stage. Latino talent triumphed again when the Chilean drama A Fantastic Woman, starring trans actor Daniela Vega in the lead, won best foreign film. The drama was the first Oscar winner to feature both a transgender storyline and star an openly trans performer.
Weinstein, an Oscar svengali who in previous years was thanked more times than God, was nowhere in sight, banished from the Academy last October after multiple allegations of his predations triggered the #MeToo avalanche.
But a jarring moment came when the retired basketball star Kobe Bryant won an Oscar for an animated short based on his farewell letter to the sport, prompting accusations of double standards among Oscar voters, given a rape accusation made against Bryant in 2003 – a case that was dropped when his accuser refused to testify and settled out of court.
Amazon’s The Big Sick and Netflix’s Mudbound won nothing, but Netflix’s film about Russian doping, Icarus, took best documentary, suggesting the Academy’s resistance to streaming services is weakening.
Blade Runner 2049 won two Oscars, with veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins collecting his first statue after 13 previous nominations.
Kimmel promised a jet ski to the winner who made the shortest speech, weaving in a quiz show vibe to balance the politics. The show ended with Mark Bridges, the Phantom Thread costume designer, scooting across the stage atop the machine. His speech had clocked in at just over 30 seconds.
Oscars winners 2018: the full list Read more
At the end of a somewhat predictable evening, we were all longing for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to work their anarchic magic, and start handing out the awards to the films that weren’t in the envelope. Perhaps for the sheer devilment, they could have given something to, say, Kathryn Bigelow’s powerful race drama Detroit, a highly plausible Oscar-worthy film, which the Academy hive mind mysteriously decided was worth precisely zilch and became utterly forgotten about. In the end, many deserving films got what they deserved, others didn’t, the internal economy of awards season dictating, as it so often does, that the rich become richer. And it was hardly obvious that this was the year of radical change in Hollywood’s sexual politics. As my colleague Benjamin Lee notes in his blog this year’s Academy Awards in fact garnered the fewest female winners for six years.
Guillermo del Toro’s escapist fantasy-romance The Shape of Water was the biggest winner, the story of a young woman’s love for a captured sea creature — with best picture and best director, setting the official seal of approval on what is, by any measure, a beautifully made movie to which audiences have responded with distinctively sensual delight. It is a lovely piece of work, with a terrific performance from Sally Hawkins: you can get to the end of it, not quite believing that she doesn’t say a word in the entire film, so commanding and eloquent is her presence. And yet in the end I couldn’t quite swoon as much as everyone else – and though this is a film which pays tribute to people who are different, it does so in the reassuring rhetoric of fabular unreality. There is something a little bit frictionless and unscary about The Shape of Water; though in progress, it has the eerie force of a dream. The Academy has gratefully submitted to its current and swirl.
Play Video 1:05 'Stand with me': Frances McDormand gets every female Oscar nominee on their feet – video
From the acting awards, for me, easily the most satisfying is Allison Janney’s barnstorming turn as LaVona Golden in I, Tonya: the dragon matriarch or icerink showbiz mom in I, Tonya, whose daughter Tonya Harding became an skating star and was then disgraced because of her ex-husband’s assault on her rival Nancy Kerrigan. Like Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Janney plays an angry and unrepentant mother, and maybe the prevalence of mothers has been an under-recognised part of this year’s awards seasons, especially as Sam Rockwell’s racist cop in Three Billboards actually lives with his mother. (There is also Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant black comic provocation, Mother! — overlooked, I am sorry to say, by the middlebrows and the sensible-shoe wearers of awards season, except of course to be mocked.) Janney’s LaVona is a brilliantly nasty, funny creation, who is spared any spurious redemptive journey.
Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell got the best actress and best supporting actor Oscars for Martin McDonagh’s jagged, angular, tonally unpredictable and – for some objectionable – black comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The success of this film and the specific successes of these two stars in these two roles perhaps raises the thorny issue of intersectionality. McDormand radiated star quality in the part of the woman looking for justice for her raped and murdered daughter. What also radiated was her character’s radioactive loathing of the police and of the men who didn’t and don’t care about women. She is a resoundingly satisfying and powerful winner in the era of #TimesUp. But Sam Rockwell’s racist cop is permitted a disputed moral comeback, and it sometimes looked as if his racism was allowed into the film as set-dressing, to offset a drama of forgiveness to which race was essentially irrelevant.
The movie’s admirers have been in a kind of Mexican standoff with this objection ever since it has been aired on social media, although I accept the good faith in which McDonagh created this character. Perhaps the least successful part of the film is that which is most easily forgotten: the sad, slightly whimsically uxorious tale of Woody Harrelson and his wife, played by Abbie Cornish. I personally would have preferred the best actress award to go to Saoirse Ronan for that excellent film Lady Bird, which came away from Oscar night empty-handed. And best supporting actor should really have gone to Willem Dafoe for his outstanding performance in The Florida Project: a performance which had a subtlety, resonance and genuine depth.
A battle cry for inclusion: The Shape of Water triumphs in Oscars of seismic change Read more
Of these three aforegoing adjectives, I think I can only really assign “resonance” to Gary Oldman’s impersonation of Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s watchable wartime drama Darkest Hour, which won him his widely predicted best actor Oscar. He was roisteringly entertaining and charismatic, and the latex mask within which he was working – interestingly different from the real, lived-in faces of other Churchill performances over the years – gave his face precisely that babyish, cherubic expression that reportedly made him a seductive figure in real life. It was a highly watchable entertainment: comfort-food wartime entertainment, perhaps, but with a terrific storytelling zing. What actually made it different was not Oldman, in fact, but the emphasis on Halifax, an excellent performance from Stephen Dillane.
The screenplay Oscars (and the foreign language Oscar) made sure that the really great movies were not overlooked. James Ivory was a thoroughly deserving winner of the best adapted screenplay Oscar for his excellent work on Luca Guadagnino’s masterly love story Call Me By Your Name. It is highly satisfying to see Ivory, a veteran of cinema, get an Academy award which is not a lifetime achievement gong (though he surely deserves one of those as well) but something to recognise his continuingly vivid, urgently passionate work right now.
Get Out was the film that I had been hoping against hope might actually win best picture. Well, it won Jordan Peele the Oscar for best original screenplay, which is excellent news. Get Out is a brilliant satire on race and the gruesome twist ending of post-Obama America which functions also as a scary movie, black comedy and an acting masterclass from its four leads.
Very often, the foreign language Oscar is an embarrassing misstep for the Academy. Not last night it wasn’t. I was tipping Ildikó Enyedi’s strange love story On Body and Soul for this, while saying that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s searing Russian drama Loveless would have been the worthy winner. In the end, I was wrong both ways – but fair enough. The Oscar went to Sebastian Lelio’s glorious A Fantastic Woman, the story of a trans woman whose grief at the death of her partner is compounded by the cruelty and indifference of society. It is a wonderful film.
Play Video 0:35 'Representation matters': Coco director thanks the people of Mexico – video
Elsewhere, there were other solid choices: Coco was the only possible choice as best animation, and this arguably could and should have been a best picture contender — although it is hardly in the league of Pixar movies like The Incredibles or the Toy Stories. Roger Deakins rightly won best cinematographer for his superb work on Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, although this award, justified as it is, perhaps doesn’t reflect quite how extraordinary a big-screen experience this film is.
Mark Bridges was also justly rewarded for his costume design on Phantom Thread — but for me this is another point of niggling exasperation with this year’s awards. Paul Thomas Anderson created another brilliant film here: a really masterly piece of work with a performance by Daniel Day-Lewis which was a jewel of this year’s awards season. And yet it has been overlooked in favour of less interesting work.
Well, there we are. To return to The Shape of Water: however conflicted I feel about its triumph, it is certainly the work of a real artist, and someone who believes in immersive cinema, total cinema, cinema that enfolds you in a complete created world.
The Shape of Water has won the Oscar for best picture at the 90th Academy Awards, defeating strong competition from Get Out, Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in what had been considered the closest Oscar race in many years.
The award was presented by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who had been involved in last year’s mix-up over La La Land and Moonlight. Acknowledging the fiasco in 2017, Beatty said: “It’s so nice seeing you again”; Dunaway added: “Presenting is lovelier second time around.” On receiving the award, del Toro, said: “I want to dedicate this to the young film-makers; the youth who are showing [us] how things are done.”
Play Video 2:52 Seven must-see moments from the Oscars 2018 - video
The cold war-set fantasy thriller stars Sally Hawkins as a mute cleaning woman who discovers a bizarre aquatic-human hybrid in a tank at a secret government lab, and helps it escape. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it led to the Mexican film-maker’s first nomination for best picture – though Del Toro was also nominated in 2007 for best original screenplay and best foreign language film for Pan’s Labyrinth.
Having led the nominations list with 13, The Shape of Water had been considered a strong candidate for the best picture Oscar, and it also won best film at the Critics’ Choice awards and the Producers Guild awards. However, it had lost out to Three Billboards at both the Golden Globes and the Baftas.
The Shape of Water review – an operatic plunge into Guillermo del Toro's immersive cinema Read more
The film’s success has come in spite of it being the subject of a plagiarism controversy in recent weeks. After the nominations were announced, the family of late playwright Paul Zindel launched legal action over “glaring similarities” between The Shape of Water and Zindel’s 1969 play Let Me Hear You Whisper. The film’s studio, Fox Searchlight, has denied the allegations.
Photo: Rob Latour/REX/Shutterstock
It felt for the longest time like a wide-open Best Picture race, but in the end, Guillermo del Toro’s whiz-bang fish-bang fantasy The Shape of Water took home the Oscars’ top prize, beating strong competitors like Get Out and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. After an auspicious early-film debut at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the coveted Golden Lion, del Toro’s film ran a slow and steady race through awards season: The Shape of Water picked up scattered, significant prizes here and there — wins at the Directors Guild and Producers Guild were crucial — but compared to other, buzzier contenders like Lady Bird and Call Me by Your Name, this retro romance took a mostly under-the-radar path to worldwide box-office riches and, ultimately, the Academy’s top prize. Here are five behind-the-scenes reasons why this interspecies romance triumphed over stiff competition.
Del Toro’s award-season availability made all the difference
Often, when actors or directors expect to be Oscar-nominated, they won’t take on new projects from November to March so that they can dedicate themselves to a full-time job of awards-season campaigning. Del Toro was among the most omnipresent of this year’s Oscar contenders, and his passionate after-screening Q&As won over many of the Oscars voters we spoke to. “Guillermo is literally the loveliest fucking person ever,” one Academy member told Vulture, while another gushed, “To hear Guillermo talk about his inspiration for that movie and what he wanted to tell and how he wanted to touch people … that resonated with me.” Del Toro’s heartfelt words gave him a leg up on the other veteran director in this field — you’re not going to hear Christopher Nolan waxing on about the power of love for 20 minutes at a talkback — and gave his movie the context that voters needed. Even if you already adored The Shape of Water, you loved it more after you heard del Toro explain why his heart compelled him to make it.
It had strong below-the-line support
Best Picture contenders Lady Bird and Get Out scored a handful of nominations each in the top eight Oscars categories but earned no support from the other branches, while close rival Three Billboards pushed into a few craft races but not nearly as many as del Toro’s sumptuous fantasy. Those below-the-line categories proved key to The Shape of Water’s appeal: All season long, even when Shape lost the top prize at shows like the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, it at least scored all the key nominations it needed with craft nods in races like cinematography, editing, sound, and costume design. That deep bench of industry support helped alleviate the only award-season snub that really stung Shape — the lack of an ensemble nod from the Screen Actors Guild — and it didn’t hurt that del Toro, the director of several technically audacious blockbusters, has already worked with many voters from those craft branches in the past. They think of him fondly, and Oscar finally gave them the chance to show their devotion.
Del Toro had a stealth “overdue” narrative
Christopher Nolan entered Oscars season as the director who had famously been given short shift by the Academy: After all, the Best Picture field expanded from five nominees in large part because Nolan’s The Dark Knight didn’t score a nod that year, and though the 47-year-old director is one of Hollywood’s biggest A-listers and his film Inception was nominated for Best Picture, he still hadn’t been nominated for a Best Director trophy himself. Perhaps all of the hubbub around Nolan obscured that del Toro had an “overdue” narrative, too: His 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth came on strong in late Oscars voting and scored six Oscar nominations and three wins, and it’s possible if the voting period had gone on just a little bit longer that year, Best Picture and Best Director nominations would have been within reach. With that in mind, handing del Toro those two Oscars this year serves as something of a make-good.
It was the consensus choice of older voters
The Shape of Water is a period-movie pastiche that tended to do better with the older Academy members we spoke to, who have more of an affinity for the setting and films it references. “Amongst many other remarkable things, it’s a love letter to Hollywood and movies,” one voter told Vulture. Another actor in the over-50 set put it even more succinctly: “It’s a movie-lover’s movie,” he said. In that way, The Shape of Water shares a lot of qualities with The Artist, another recent Best Picture winner that wears its old-school cinematic influences on its sleeve. Both movies even have mute lead characters, which may account for the fact they are the only two Best Picture winners from the last decade to take that top prize without also winning a screenplay Oscar.
Academy members have settled into the Trump era
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Last year, the retro-leaning La La Land was up against the utterly contemporary Moonlight, and in the shadow of Trump’s inauguration, the latter pulled out an upset win. It took nothing away from the immense quality of Moonlight to note that many Oscars voters felt that by picking it, they could at least move their industry forward even as the world appeared to be spinning backward. While The Shape of Water has more contemporary relevance and progressive heft than it often got credit for, its Best Picture win does not send as explicit a message. Had the trophy gone to Lady Bird, it would have been a historic victory for a female director making her solo debut behind the camera. Three Billboards surely would have represented a controversial Best Picture pick, but it would have said something about the country’s inchoate rage at those who are supposed to protect us. And if Get Out had triumphed, the Academy could have recognized the most contemporary contender, canonized a scalding satire of racial politics, and scandalized the Fox News set all at once. The Shape of Water’s victory is not destined to spawn as many think pieces: It won because they liked it the most. In the end, for weary voters grappling with a metric ton of depressing real-world headlines, an escape into del Toro’s romantic fantasy was all they wanted.
