As the headline says, here are four interesting tidbits about last night’s Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. The film earned four Oscars last night, including Best Director for Guillermo del Toro, Best Score for Alexandre Desplat and Best Art Direction. And no, these aren’t four random tidbits culled from IMDB, but rather a few notes that make The Shape of Water a rather interesting Best Picture winner. So, without further ado…
It’s the first Best Picture winner to be released in December since Million Dollar Baby.
With all the focus by the studios in what amounts to an end-of-year blitz of Oscar contenders, we haven’t had an actual Best Picture winner that opened in the last month of the year since since Million Dollar Baby in 2005. And even that was partially a result of a field that lacked a front-runner prior to Eastwood’s boxing drama wowing the critics very late in the game. Fox arguably hoped that Steven Spielberg’s The Post would take that last-minute frontrunner slot, but that didn’t happen.
Had Get Out triumphed, it would have been the earliest Best Picture winner (late February) since The Silence of the Lambs back in 1991. I'm not thrilled that a December release just took the statue, as it won't exactly discourage the studios from holding all of their allegedly great movies until the end of the year. But I'm not going to hold it against a terrific film that in some ways is a very unconventional Best Picture winner.
It’s the first outright sci-fi fantasy Best Picture winner ever.
You can make the case that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was, up until last night, the first the last fantasy Best Picture winner. But whether you count Shape of Water as a fantasy flick or a sci-fi film, it’s the first unapologetic sci-fi fantasy flick, with just a bit of horror and erotic drama thrown in for good measure, to take the big prize. Oscar has never shied away from more conventional genres, like cops-n-robbers (The Departed), romantic horror (Rebecca) or blustery action pictures (Braveheart). But we’ve never had a pure sci-fi fantasy flick take the top prize.
It’s the highest-grossing Best Picture winner (in North America) in five years.
While the $57 million domestic total for Del Toro’s acclaimed fantasy is relatively impressive in this Netflix-and-chill era, it’s not exactly a king’s ransom, even on a $20m budget. But, for what it’s worth, it’s the biggest-grossing domestic earner to take the big prize since Ben Affleck’s Argo earned $132m domestic in 2012/2013. In terms of worldwide box office, it’s merely the biggest global grosser since 12 Years A Slave ($157m) in 2013/2014.
That was also a Fox Searchlight flick, by the by. I would argue that Fox Searchlight has replaced Harvey Weinstein’s various studios as the go-to distributor and seller of multiplex-friendly Oscar movies. That’s something that Walt Disney should consider should their Fox acquisition become a reality. If Disney is willing to keep Fox and Fox Searchlight intact, they could be as much of an Oscar powerhouse as they are a tentpole one. Besides, if adult movies are going to continue to be theatrical risks, the Oscar pictures will need a studio with Disney's deep pockets.
It’s the first Best Picture winner with a female lead since Million Dollar Baby.
This is pretty sad, but Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, for which Hillary Swank won her second Best Actress Oscar, was the last Best Picture winner that was specifically about a woman’s story. Since then, we’ve had male-led melodramas (Crash), action flicks (The Departed), biopics (The King’s Speech) and the like. Before Million Dollar Baby, it was Chicago in 2003, Titanic in 1998. The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 and Driving Miss Daisy in 1990. As to why it's been 13 years, well, that's no mystery.
As a rule, movies about women/for women are considered less serious or worthy of critical acclaim as male-centric melodramas. They still get nominated, especially since the Best Picture category was expanded in 2010, but they are almost never considered among the frontrunners. The good news is that three of the four frontrunners (Three Billboards, Lady Bird and Shape of Water) were acclaimed and successful flicks where a woman’s story was front-and-center. Heck, much of the awards season was dominated by female-centric flicks of all stripes, which itself was incredibly encouraging.
