Wonder Woman stumbles at Oscars
LOS ANGELES — Wonder Woman failed to conquer Oscar voters on Tuesday despite riding to one of the biggest box office hits of 2017 on a wave of female empowerment, making it one of the biggest snubs for Hollywood’s highest honors.
The Warner Bros. movie, featuring Gal Gadot as the sword-wielding Wonder Woman, was the first standalone female superhero film since 2005 and earned some $825 million globally, making its filmmaker Patty Jenkins, 46, the highestgrossing female director in Hollywood.
But at Tuesday’s Oscar nominations, Jenkins was left off the director’s race and the film was snubbed in the best picture category, despite nods for other movies about women and made by women.
Instead, it was Guillermo Del Toro’s surreal fantasy romance The Shape of Water that led the Oscar nominations with 13 nods. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have traditionally disdained big action and superhero movies in favor of smaller arthouse fare, like last year’s Oscar champion Moonlight and this year’s dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which landed seven nods.
Since 1990, only the 2003 fantasy epic Lord of the Rings; The Return of the King snapped that trend to win the top Oscar honor. Sci-fi movie Avatar, still the biggest box office movie of all time, received a best picture nomination in 2010 but lost out to The Hurt Locker.
This year’s surprises include four nominations in key categories for Jordan Peele’s Get Out, in which an African-American man finds himself trapped at his white girlfriend’s house with her strange family. The $5 million horror movie from Universal Pictures became a box office success with more than $250 million globally.
Veteran actor Christopher Plummer, 88, was also a surprise contender in the supporting actor race for Sony Pictures’ Getty kidnapping film All the Money in the World.
The Disaster Artist, a comedy about the worst Hollywood film ever made, received early awards attention but only landed one Oscar nomination, for best adapted screenplay.