Guillermo del Toro has created a richly sensual and dreamlike film that, in the end, seduced the Academy without being too threatening
At the end of a somewhat predictable evening, we were all longing for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to work their anarchic magic, and start handing out the awards to the films that weren’t in the envelope. Perhaps for the sheer devilment, they could have given something to, say, Kathryn Bigelow’s powerful race drama Detroit, a highly plausible Oscar-worthy film, which the Academy hivemind mysteriously decided was worth precisely zilch and became utterly forgotten about. In the end, many deserving films got what they deserved, others didn’t, the internal economy of awards season dictating, as it so often does, that the rich become richer. And it was hardly obvious that this was the year of radical change in Hollywood’s sexual politics. As my colleague Benjamin Lee notes in his blog this year’s Academy Awards in fact garnered the fewest amount of female winners for six years.
Guillermo del Toro’s escapist fantasy-romance The Shape of Water was the biggest winner, the story of a young woman’s love for a captured sea creature — with best picture and best director, setting the official seal of approval on what is, by any measure, a beautifully made movie to which audiences have responded with distinctively sensual delight. It is a lovely piece of work, with a terrific performance from Sally Hawkins: you can get to the end of it, not quite believing that she doesn’t say a word in the entire film, so commanding and eloquent is her presence. And yet in the end I couldn’t quite swoon as much as everyone else – and though this is a film which pays tribute to people who are different, it does so in the reassuring rhetoric of fabular unreality. There is something a little bit frictionless and unscary about The Shape of Water; though in progress, it has the eerie force of a dream. The Academy has gratefully submitted to its current and swirl.
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