Despite host Jimmy Kimmel’s best efforts, the 90th annual Academy Awards ran over its runtime (as usual) but wrapped up with an exciting win for writer-director Guillermo del Toro: The Shape of Water took home the Oscar for Best Picture.
Beating out an impressive slate that included coming-of-age tales (Lady Bird, Call Me By Your Name), war films (Dunkirk, Darkest Hour), and socially-conscious horror (Get Out), The Shape of Water ultimately took home four awards: Best Production Design, Best Original Score, Best Director for del Toro, and Best Picture.
“I am an immigrant,” del Toro began his acceptance speech for Best Director, going on to praise the “country all my own” he has lived in for the past 25 years as well as Hollywood: “I think that the greatest thing our industry does is to erase the lines in this sand. We should continue doing that, when the world tells us to make them deeper.”
Watch his speech below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAx0b4Fqju8
And his acceptance speech for Best Picture, dedicating it to “the youth who is showing us how things are done.” He went on, “Everyone that is dreaming of a parable of using genre fantasy to tell the stories about the things that are real in the world today, you can do it. This is a door—kick it open and come in.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hnYE_URTpc
Jordan Peele took home Best Original Screenplay for Get Out, with an equally stirring speech about how he almost stopped writing the film 20 different times, thanking “all the people who raised my voice and let me make this movie” and everyone who saw this movie in the theaters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVmuTIQBoio
The complete list of nominees and winners (bolded), below:
Best Picture
- Call Me By Your Name
- Darkest Hour
- Dunkirk
- Get Out
- Lady Bird
- Phantom Thread
- The Post
- The Shape of Water
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Directing
- Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk)
- Jordan Peele (Get Out)
- Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird)
- Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread)
- Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water)
Actress in a Leading Role
- Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water)
- Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)
- Margot Robbie (I, Tonya)
- Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird)
- Meryl Streep (The Post)
Actor in a Leading Role
- Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name)
- Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread)
- Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out)
- Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour)
- Denzel Washington (Roman J. Israel, Esq.)
Writing (Original Screenplay)
- The Big Sick
- Get Out
- Lady Bird
- The Shape Of Water
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
- Call Me By Your Name
- The Disaster Artist
- Logan
- Molly’s Game
- Mudbound
Animated Feature Film
- The Boss Baby
- The Breadwinner
- Coco
- Ferdinand
- Loving Vincent
Music (Original Song)
- “Mighty River” (Mudbound)
- “Mystery of Love” (Call Me By Your Name)
- “Remember Me” (Coco)
- “Stand Up for Something” (Marshall)
- “This is Me” (The Greatest Showman)
Documentary (Feature)
- Abacus: Small Enough To Jail
- Faces Places
- Icarus
- Last Men In Aleppo
- Strong Island
Documentary (Short Subject)
- Edith + Eddie
- Heaven Is A Traffic Jam On The 405
- Heroin(e)
- Knife Skills
- Traffic Stop
Foreign Language Film
- A Fantastic Woman
- The Insult
- Loveless
- On Body And Soul
- The Square
Actor in a Supporting Role
- Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project)
- Woody Harrelson (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)
- Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water)
- Christopher Plummer (All the Money in the World)
- Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)
Actress in a Supporting Role
- Mary J. Blige (Mudbound)
- Allison Janney (I, Tonya)
- Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread)
- Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird)
- Octavia Spencer (The Shape of Water)
Makeup and Hairstyling
- Darkest Hour
- Victoria and Abdul
- Wonder
Film Editing
- Baby Driver
- Dunkirk
- I, Tonya
- The Shape Of Water
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Visual Effects
- Blade Runner 2049
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
- Kong: Skull Island
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi
- War for the Planet of the Apes
Music (Original Score)
- Dunkirk
- Phantom Thread
- The Shape of Water
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Short Film (Live Action)
- DeKalb Elementary
- The Eleven O’Clock
- My Nephew Emmett
- The Silent Child
- Watu Wote/All Of Us
Short Film (Animated)
- Dear Basketball
- Garden Party
- Lou
- Negative Space
- Revolting Rhymes
Sound Mixing
- Baby Driver
- Blade Runner 2049
- Dunkirk
- The Shape of Water
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Sound Editing
- Baby Driver
- Blade Runner 2049
- Dunkirk
- The Shape of Water
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Costume Design
- Beauty and the Beast
- Darkest Hour
- Phantom Thread
- The Shape of Water
- Victoria and Abdul
Cinematography
- Blade Runner 2049
- Darkest Hour
- Dunkirk
- Mudbound
- The Shape of Water
Production Design
- Beauty and the Beast
- Blade Runner 2049
- Darkest Hour
- Dunkirk
- The Shape of Water
Shape of Water, that is the Hellboy prequel? The Abe Sapien solo movie, right? Good to see the Hellboy Cinematic Universe is off to a good start, suck it DC.
I’m eating my words today, and happy to be doing it. I said SoW got an Oscar nom as a courtesy gesture to genre, but the Academy would give Best Picture to something ‘serious’ like Three Billboards. Yum, tastes great!
True to form, the Oscars committee is completely out of touch. Get Out is the only movie on that best picture list that will still be relevant in a decade. No disrespect intended to the other movies, many of which I liked.
@@@@@ cecrow
I imagine you haven’t actually seen Three Billboards, it’s about as far from an Oscar bait movie as it gets and like other Martin McDonagh’s movies (In Bruges, Seven Psychopats) it’s hard to classift and mixes genres and themes really well.
@colin: Perhaps you will be right about Get Out in ten years, but that’s not how the academy operates. They vote for how they wish to be represented now.
Shape of Water is right up their alley. That it’s a genre film may be irrelevant to them. It’s a fable, a parable about embracing others different than yourself.
@3: Who cares if it’s “relevant”? I thought the Oscars were supposed to be awarded based on whether it’s a good movie. If anything, I thought the Academy had a reputation for erring too far in the direction of giving awards to movies because they’re “socially relevant” (like, say, Philadelphia).
Also, from what I know about it, I would’ve said that Let Me In is less likely to age well than some of the others on the list. Not because it’s not good, or because race relations aren’t always an important issue, but it’s very much “of its time” in a way that, say, Darkest Hour is not. (Disclaimer: The only one of the best-picture nominees that I’ve seen so far is Dunkirk, so feel free to take my assessment of them with a grain of salt.)
Other thoughts:
I appreciated the fact that the majority of the nominees for Best Picture took home at least one significant award. While it may be exciting to watch a movie make a clean sweep of the awards, you can’t help feeling sorry for the other movies that got nothing because they had the misfortune to come out in the wrong year. It’s nice when they spread the love around.
I didn’t think to look for Doug Jones when I was watching the ceremony last night, but Google confirmed that he was there, and you can see him amongst the crowd on stage during Del Toro’s acceptance speech.
Also, #JLaw-so-tall! I don’t know if she was wearing heels, but she towered over Jodie Foster!
No, I don’t think the Academy errs on the side of films that are socially relevant, and anyway I didn’t mean socially relevant–I meant cinematic relevance. Get Out is a better film. When you look back the list of winners, or even nominees, of just the past few decades, it is really obvious how safe (and wrong) the Academy usually votes.
@8 “better” Is a subjective standard.
@8: What does “cinematic relevance” even mean? If you think Get Out is just a better film, fair enough, but what exactly is it “relevant” to, if not social issues? As for social relevance, have you never heard any of the jokes about how you’re more likely to win an Oscar if you’re playing a disabled person or a persecuted minority? There’s an element of truth there. Just looking at the last ten years of Best Picture winners, I count four (Moonlight, Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave and The Hurt Locker) that deal with hot-button topics. (The ratio drops a little if you extend it to twenty years, and add Crash and Million Dollar Baby.)
On a completely different note (for the record I was also rooting for Get Out, but because I thought it was better constructed rather than because of subject matter): am I the only person who has been rattled by the plagiarism lawsuit against del Toro? I know that at this point it’s only an allegation and not settled, and that frivolous plagiarism lawsuits are pretty common in Hollywood. And I don’t think it’s likely that del Toro stole material on purpose. But the similarities of exact images, like the mop dance, between the play and the film are pretty startling. Put it this way: if I had written something and another work turned up with similarities so precise, I wouldn’t be as defensive as del Toro has been: I’d be abashed and seriously considering the possibility that I might have read or seen the other work a long time ago and that its images got into my subconscious.
So far, del Toro’s defensive attitude has rather soured me on the film, which has been upsetting because I did like it very much. I’ve pulled it from my Hugo nomination ballot and won’t reinstate it unless a more convincing explanation of the similarities to the play emerges by the deadline. (At least there have been SO many strong entries in long drama this year that it’s easy to fill a ballot several times over.) Am I the only one who is uncomfortable about this?
(Not going to touch the contested depiction of disability issues since there was a very thoughtful article and intelligent discussion of that on this site a while back, so I’ll just refer over to that.)
Congrats to the winners.
I haven’t seen Shape of Water. Just can’t get past the premise of Gillman finally getting laid. What’s next, Frankenstein being loved by the villagers? ;-)
I just realized I wrote Let Me In in my earlier post, when of course I obviously meant Get Out. Chalk it up to a brain-fart.