Fresh voices lead Oscars

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.

The 90th annual Academy Awards on Tuesday gave many who have long been shunned by the movie business — women directors, transgender filmmakers, minority actors, even Netflix — something to cheer about.

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 #MeToo movement that has been felt especially acutely in Hollywood, where male filmmakers outnumber women by approximately 12-to-1.

Gerwig, the writer-director of the nuanced coming-of-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 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.’ That’s what I want. And I want it selfishly because I want to see their stories.”

Morrison posted on Twitter of her nomination: “I hope it tells all the dreamers out there (especially the young girls with cameras in their hands) that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.”

Jordan Peele, director of the horror sensation “Get Out,” becomes the fifth black filmmaker nominated for best director, and the third to helm a bestpicture 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. It makes me want to make as many movies that I can in my life.

“The Shape of Water” scored a wide array for nominations for its cast (Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer), del Toro’s directing, its sumptuous score (by Alexandre Desplat) and its technical craft. Del Toro said in an interview Tuesday of his film’s resonance, “You realize that we are all, in some way or another, a bit of an outsider in different ways. 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.”

Winners of the 90th Academy Awards will be revealed at the ceremony on March 4.