Standing on a magnificently vajazzled stage last night, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway read out the name of this year’s Best Picture winner: “The Shape of Water.” And, it being the two of them, desperately atoning for the previous year’s envelope fracas, we can be absolutely, 100%, rock-solid certain that “The Shape of Water” did actually win. So how did the 2018 Best Picture race, which in Oscar-chat circles at least, was dubbed the most difficult to call in recent memory (remember, everyone was fine with calling 2017’s Best Picture, just everyone, even the presenters, called it wrong), end up with ‘Shape’ taking the ribbon?
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Best Picture was the fourth statue ‘Shape’ took home from its 13 nominations. It broke with the recent trend of splitting Best Director and Best Picture wins, which had happened only 26 times in 89 years, but 4 times out of the 5 prior ceremonies. (Loooads more Oscar numbers fun here). Yet there is a definite aura of disappointment that clings to the choice (indeed, over the whole fine-I-guess shebang that was the 90th Oscars — more on that here).
READ MORE: Guillermo Del Toro Wins Best Director For ‘The Shape of Water’
And the speed with which Film Twitter went from declaring the three-way dash between Martin McDonagh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Jordan Peele’s dark horse “Get Out” and Guillermo del Toro‘s “Insert Reductive Fishfucking Gag Here” just too excitingly close to call, to those same pundits yawning extravagantly and rolling their eyes that the “safe” choice won, could have given one whiplash (Chazelle, 2014).
READ MORE: ‘The Shape of Water’ Wins Best Picture & Director: The Full List Of Oscar Winners Here
What are the whys and wherefores of this win for “The Shape of Water” and are we allowed to feel good about it? Let’s investigate.
The Shape of Wokeness
Unsurprisingly, in one form or another, issues around diversity, equality and representation formed a backdrop just as inescapable as, if a little less gaudy than the Fortress of Solitude ice-cavern stage set on which it all took place. Jimmy Kimmel addressed #MeToo in his opening monologue; three of the most outspoken #TimesUp advocates — Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra and Salma Hayek — co-presented with visible emotion; Jordan Peele‘s Original Screenplay win got the biggest roar of the night (perhaps apart from “This is Me” a song celebrating uniqueness and acceptance as practised by well-known liberal snowflake PT Barnum); several winners made reference to their immigrant status; and Frances McDormand (bless her for absolute ever) got right to heart of the issue by dispensing with namby talk of following your dreams and demanding development deals and dry cash for the women in the hall. But whatever happened last night was just the tip of an iceberg that has fundamentally destabilized Hollywood from within, while it also feels assailed as never before from without: Notoriously a hotbed of left-leaning liberality, under the current Presidency, Hollywood is more than ever-embattled. TL;DR? As an image-based industry more than ever aware of its political image, Hollywood doesn’t just want to do the right thing by the causes so many there hold so dear to their hearts. It wants to be seen to do the right thing too. What film sends the right message?
The trickiest part about the new wokeness narrative is it has many, many strands. “The Shape of Water” scores less highly than some of the fancied titles in some of the categories. But it scores well across a broader spectrum of them than any other film. “Call Me By Your Name” was a huge favorite with LGBT audiences; massive hit “Get Out” became the standard bearer for African-American filmmaking right up to the point it was supplanted by “Black Panther,” with whom it shares its main star (Daniel Kaluuya); “Lady Bird” was the widely adored, female-centric directorial debut from widely adored female Greta Gerwig; “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” may have lost some ground due to the perception of its racial politics, but its lightning-rod properties as a conduit for significant female rage in the year of #MeToo shouldn’t be underestimated. All of these films played very well to one particular constituency or another. (And all made a vote for something like “Dunkirk,” “Darkest Hour,” “The Post,” or even the wonderful “Phantom Thread” feel like a waste of an opportunity for pushing one’s agenda. Or for virtue signaling, if you’re feeling cynical.)
Now, let’s think of “The Shape of Water.” It yielded a Best Supporting Actress nomination for a black actor (Octavia Spencer); a Best Supporting Actor nod for a stalwart veteran playing a gay character (Richard Jenkins); it features a wonderful female lead in previous nominee Sally Hawkins, who was duly nominated for Best Actress here; its story, though fantasy, could not be more clearly preaching the kind of message of acceptance, inclusivity, and the challenging of authoritarianism that strikes a political chord right now; its villain is marked by both misogyny and religious intransigence; and its director is a Spanish-speaking, self-described “immigrant.” Whether you like the film or not, it was by far the most intersectional title on offer to voters, and while that might just sound like an irritating buzz word, it does mean the film is more or less unobjectionable on a political level. And in these fraught times, when the Academy decides the award on a preferential ballot (so 2nd, 3rd, even 4th choices count for a lot) that is definitely not nothing.
The Guillermo del Toro factor.
Do not underestimate just how well-liked Guillermo del Toro is. Whether he’s on Twitter championing fish-God fan-art, or in photos looking like a myopic, huggable genie ready to delightedly grant you a wish, or appearing as a knowledgeable and passionate talking head in a documentary (see his indelible contribution to Mark Harris‘ excellent “Five Came Back“), del Toro is just so damn lovable. And these things are to some degree popularity contests — never forget that the people who actually vote are themselves Academy members, so your standing within that community, and your reputation amongst the various guilds, is crucial. “The Shape of Water” covers a lot of areas of interest, it has that complete-package feel, in that it is a very visually stylized, well performed, well designed, and yet hugely idiosyncratic film that feels like it could only ever have come from del Toro. That is one of the many reasons he led the field easily, right from the beginning, in the Best Director category. But his profile outside the direction “silo” — as a producer of film and TV, and as a personality — also means that voters were going to be happy to see him up there a second time. And ultimately, of all of del Toro’s films (and we said this at the time when we reviewed “The Shape of Water” in Venice), this one feels like the purest distillation of his lovable-geek persona. If you like del Toro, you’ll like ‘Shape’ and you’d have to be a Michael Shannon-esque monster not to love del Toro. It’s essentially a cult of personality, but a giggly, benign one.
It’s a Movie About Movies.
We all know how much the Academy loves anything that reflects back on their own industry. And del Toro being the cinephile that he is, loaded “The Shape of Water” with classic movie references, and with a dreamy Golden Age vibe, that could easily appeal to the nostalgist, escapist crowd (who actually might have wanted nothing to do with the politics discussed above). Whether it was a coincidence that the show organizers decided to go with a slightly old-timey sensibility and that they commissioned montages of classic clips that were essentially cut to the theme of “Hey! Ain’t movies great!?” it certainly feels in retrospect like that whole evening was priming us for a ‘Shape’ win.
Its Biggest Competition Faltered (Or Maybe Wasn’t That Big To Begin With?)
It’s easy to overstate the impact that a relatively arcane debate about “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and its racial politics, might have had on its chances. But even if we’re careful not to inflate that narrative too much, it’s true that Martin McDonagh’s film divided opinions in a way ‘Shape’ did not. The most dramatic evidence of this was the fact that it scored a Best Picture nod without scoring one for Best Director. Aha! I hear you poindexters cry, but “Argo” won Best Picture without Ben Affleck getting a nomination for Best Director! And of course that’s true, and we all remember it clearly because the outrage for Affleck’s snubbing was so vociferous that it might actually have helped power “Argo” over the finish line for Best Picture. By contrast, the loudest complaints about McDonagh’s shut-out status were heard from tumbleweed and crickets.
“Get Out” is a more nuanced case, in that Jordan Peele did, of course, score a Best Director nomination, and the film seemed to be picking up steam rather than losing it as the weeks ticked by. But it’s also very possible that we all overestimated the base it was starting from in the first place: “Get Out” might be a particularly smart, socially provocative and wildly timely horror movie, but it is a horror movie and the Academy, despite its changing demographics, is still largely populated with voters for whom that would be a bitter pill to swallow. Of course, we could just cry racism, and indeed it might partially be down to inherent bias against another black movie winning the year after “Moonlight” did, but the traditional bias against the horror genre as just too declassé for the Academy must also have been a factor.
So Fine, What You’re Saying Is, Let’s Grin and Bear The Win For ‘The Shape Of Water’?
Nope! You might take all this to mean that “The Shape of Water” is everybody’s compromise choice, and let’s not grumble too much because it could have been ‘Three Billboards’ and the Outrage Express would have exploded in a shower of spicy hot takes. But seriously, “The Shape of Water” is a much better, and faaaar weirder film than we’ve given it credit for. It may have ended up being politically and thematically the easiest of all available options. But that “safe choice” is a fantasy film — already usually an Academy no-no — about a mute woman (whom we see masturbating on a daily basis) who falls in love and explicitly has sex with a fish-deity-monster-thing, in some kind of steampunk reimagining of the Cold War where her only allies are a black cleaning lady and an older gay man. This is not some “The King’s Speech.” It’s not “Crash.”
Oscars don't actually determine what movie is "best." There is no such thing as best. If anything, it influences the legacy of movies SLIGHTLY. What Best Picture does do is convince the industry to make more movies like the winner. There are worse templates than Shape of Water
— Jesse David Fox (@JesseDavidFox) March 5, 2018
As del Toro himself joked in his first acceptance speech, it was a slightly insane picture for Fox Searchlight to have got behind in the first place: a deliriously offbeat, absurdly touching, immensely personal film that feels in every frame like it was loved into being. Whether or not you love it back is entirely up to you of course, but a year in which “The Shape of Water” is the fallback choice for Best Picture is a great year for movies — and more than anything about the movies themselves it suggests that our definition of what is “safe” is changing, and for the better.