SHAPE OF WATER TRIUMPHS AT OSCARS
The 90th Academy Awards ceremony skittered between the serious and the silly on Sunday night, taking time both to acknowledge #MeToo and to hand out hot dogs at an adjacent movie theatre, but the show ultimately emerged as a powerful call for inclusion and diversity in Hollywood.
Guillermo del Toro’s outcast parable, The Shape of
Water, was honoured as best picture, and del Toro won the best director Oscar. Jordan Peele collected the best original screenplay award for Get
Out, a movie centered on racism in the liberal white suburbs. And Frances McDormand, winning best actress for her portryal of a mother seeking justice for her murdered daughter in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,
Missouri, made a dramatic stand for gender equality in Hollywood.
She thanked “every single person in this building” and her sister before asking the female nominees in the room to stand. “Look around,” she said. “We all have stories to tell and projects we need financing.”
McDormand’s win was expected, as was Gary Oldman’s ( Darkest Hour) for best actor.
“If I fall over, pick me up, because I’ve got some things to say,” McDormand said.
McDormand finished with, “I have two words to say: inclusion rider,” a reference to a practice by which stars add a clause to film contracts that insists on diversity on both sides of the camera.
Jodie Foster, appearing on crutches and joking that the reason was run-in with Meryl Streep, presented best actress with Jennifer Lawrence, in lieu of last year’s best-actor winner, Casey Affleck. Affleck bypassed the ceremony amid continued criticism for settling sexual harassment suits in the past.
In a halting acceptance speech, Oldman thanked the film’s director and producers; Winston Churchill; his wife, Gisele Schmid; and his 99-yearold mother, who he said was home watching on the sofa. “Put the kettle on,” he said. “I’m bringing Oscar home.”
It was a democratic Oscars over all. Only two of the nine best picture nominees went home empty-handed: Lady
Bird and The Post. The other seven collected at least one award each, preventing any one film from sweeping the ceremony.
Winners included legends who had never before won, among them James Ivory ( Call
Me by Your Name) and Roger A Deakins ( Blade Runner 2049), and first-time nominees like Jordan Peele, who landed best original screenplay for Get
Out, and Allison Janney, a television stalwart who won over the film academy with her supporting work in the darkly
comedic Tonya Harding biopic I, Tonya.
“I have been at this a long time,” said Deakins, a 14-time nominee. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” He started his career in the 1970s and was first nominated in 1995, for The Shawshank Redemption.
Del Toro’s best director honor was widely expected — he took the top prize at several preceding awards shows — and he was an omnipresent darling of the awards circuit, at one point bringing a case of tequila had of The Hollywood, finally win to an won meant awards the after that acceptance function. del being Toro looked director down for much on of as his a horror career.
“Ia man immigrant ,” an Tor os tar ted his acceptance speech by saying,note that art has the power to “erase the lines in the sand” between people of different ethnicities. “We should continue doing that when the world tells us to make them deeper.”
The best picture award was presented by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who because of a mix-up backstage by PwC, mistakenly announced last year’s best picture winner as La
LaLand instead of Moonlight. “I want to dedicate to every young filmmaker— the youth who are showing us how things are done,” said del Toro when he accepted the award for best picture. The Shape of Water also won for Alexandre Desplat’s score and Paul Denham Au st er berry’ s production design.
Peele, who wrote and directed
“Get Out ,” got a raucous standing ovation for winning best original screenplay, signaling the
Hollywood establishment’s respect for his movie and also his arrival as a certified member of that elite group. He thanked hismother, who, he said, “Taught me to love even in the face of hate.” Ivory, 89, a four-time nominee, won for best adapted screenplay for the gay romance Call Me by Your Name. All people, “whether straight or gay or somewhere in between,” can understand the emotions of a first love, Ivory said, reading from notes.