Oscar nominations in
Oddball fantasy Shape of Water leads diverse list with 13 nods.
NEW YORK — The Academy Awards showered outsiders, on screen and off, with milestone-setting nominations that celebrated Guillermo del Toro’s full-hearted ode to outcasts The Shape of Water, embraced first-time filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele, and made Mudbound director of photography Rachel Morrison the first woman ever nominated for best cinematography.
Leading all nominees with 13 nods, including best picture, was The Shape of Water, by veteran Mexican filmmaker del Toro, whose Cold War-era fantasy is about a mute office cleaner (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an amphibious creature. But the nominations also carried forward some of the ongoing reckoning of the Me Too movement that has been felt especially acutely in Hollywood, where male filmmakers outnumber women by a ratio of approximately 12-to-1.
Gerwig, the writer-director of the nuanced comingof-age tale Lady Bird, became just the fifth woman nominated for best director, following Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow, the sole woman to win, for The Hurt Locker. Speaking by phone Tuesday from Los Angeles, Gerwig said the distinction was extremely meaningful.
“When I think about Kathryn Bigelow winning and me sitting there watching it and feeling suddenly like, ‘It’s possible,’” said Gerwig. “To be nominated as the fifth woman, I hope that what it does is that women of all ages look at it and they also find the spark within themselves that says: ‘Now I have to go make my movie.’”
In what’s been a wideopen awards season, Oscar voters chose nine best-picture nominees, including four with female protagonists: The Shape of Water, Lady Bird; Martin McDonaugh’s rage-fueled comic drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Mis- souri; Peele’s horror sensation Get Out; Joe Wright’s Winston Churchill drama Darkest Hour; Steven Spielberg’s timely newspaper drama The Post; Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk; Luca Guadagnino’s tender love story Call
Me By Your Name; and
Paul Thomas Anderson’s twisted romance Phantom Thread.
Peele becomes the fifth black filmmaker nominated for best director, and the third to helm a best-picture nominee, following Barry Jenkins last year for Moonlight. He’s also the third person to receive best-picture, director and writing nods for his first feature film after Warren Beatty (Heaven Can Wait) and James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment).
“I’m going to write. I’m now going to get hard at work on the next one,” Peele said by phone. “One of the greatest things that I get from this whole process is this faith in my voice. It’s like jet fuel.”
The Shape of Water landed just shy of tying the record of 14 nominations, scoring a wide array of nominations for its cast (Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer), del Toro’s directing, its sumptuous score (by Alexandre Desplat) and its technical craft.
“You realize that we are all, in some way or another, a bit of an outsider in different ways,” said del Toro of his film’s resonance. “Not fearing the other but embracing the other is the only way to go as a race. The urgency of that message of hope and emotion is what sustained the faith for roughly half a decade that the movie needed to be made.”
All of the acting front-runners — Frances McDormand (Three Billboards), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards)— landed their expected nominations. But there were plenty of surprises in the nominations announced from Los Angeles ahead of the March 4 ceremony, to be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.
There were eight firsttime acting nominees, including 22-year-old Call Me
By Your Name breakthrough Timothee Chalamet and Daniel Kaluuya, 28, of Get Out. Saoirse Ronan, 23, landed her third Oscar nod, for Lady Bird.
Christopher Plummer, who replaced Kevin Spacey in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, also sneaked into the best-supporting-actor category. Added to the film in reshoots little more than a month before the film’s release, 88-year-old Plummer is the oldest acting nominee ever.
Three Billboards scored seven nominations Tuesday, behind only The Shape of Water and Dunkirk. The World War II epic, thus far little-honored in Hollywood’s awards season, emerged especially strong with Oscar voters, taking eight nominations, many of them in technical categories. It’s Nolan’s first nomination for best director.