Genre blockbusters The Shape of Water and Get Out scored big at this year's Academy Awards. Wow, how did that happen?
I'll admit that most of the time I don't give the Oscars much credence. Truthfully, I haven't since 1994, when Pulp Fiction was overlooked in favour of Forrest Gump, and I decided that the Academy's choices were far too pedestrian for me to take seriously. Even so, I couldn't help but be pleased when I heard that the Best Picture award had gone to an honest-to-goodness Monster Movie in Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water. Sort of like my home team has won the championships, never mind that I'm not a big football fan either.
Even more surprising to me, Get Out - an actual, real live horror movie - had made it to the winners' circle too. In fact between them, those two films had managed an impressive five wins and twelve nominations - which, remarkably, included all of the super-prestigious 'big five' categories (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay). And that's not even counting the pair of statuettes and three nominations earned by Blade Runner 2049 (okay, 'Best Visual Effects' was never going to go to Lady Bird, but it still counts). It was starting to look like a breakthrough year for genre films.
True, the technical awards are always a bit more diverse, but the 'big five' winners hardly ever include horror or fantasy. Return of the King, which featured more than its fair share of monsters, was the major exception fifteen years ago; the last time before that was in 1991, if we count Silence of the Lambs as a horror film. SOTL took home a clean sweep; Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Demme), Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster) and Best Screenplay (Ted Tally). Look further back than this and the list of big-five horror contenders is depressingly short. Kathy Bates got Best Actress for Misery in 1990; The Exorcist Best Adapted Screenplay in 1973; and lastly, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde earned Frederic March a Best Actor statuette all the way back in 1932. Even then he had to share the award with Wallace Beery. (March noted in his acceptance speech that both men had recently adopted children, adding wryly, "Under the circumstances, it seems a little odd that Wally and I were both given awards for the best male performance of the year.")
But the biggest surprise for me this year was the reaction of the media. Specifically, that in the wake of the Weinstein scandal, and the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, a film as far-out as The Shape Of Water could be seen as "a safe choice".
The Guardian (UK)'s overall reaction, for example, was "no alarms, no surprises", although it did include a caveat about TSOW's subject matter: "It features onanism, graphic violence, and – here’s the kicker – a woman procreating with a sea creature. It’s hardly Driving Miss Daisy." In fairness, host Jimmy Kimmel's opening speech also acknowledged the strangeness:
"Thanks to Guillermo, we will always remember this year as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish."
So in the end, it wasn't so much that my favourite genres were finally being deemed artistically respectable as a whole, but that del Toro and Peele's films were able to make all the right political noises for the Academy's voters while dressing up their potentially controversial ideas in a non-threatening cloak of the unreal.
As several commentators have pointed out, 'inclusion' was a key word this year. TSOW, with its cast of marginalised characters (a gay man, a black woman, a disabled person and, er... a sea monster) was therefore a less surprising entry than it could have been. Vox said: "it’s obviously meant as a commentary ... on the noxious nature of ideologies that leave no room for empathy. You can’t exactly call it political, but its social commentary has political ramifications."
Get Out was an even greater anomaly. The ironically witty but frank treatment of racism in Jordan Peele's debut film might have made it a bit too confrontational had it not been based in fantasy (albeit gruesome), but as Rod Serling pointed out a long time ago, a Martian is allowed to say things on TV that a Republican or Democrat is not. Likewise, a film-maker can get away with making some subversive and very caustic points about how white people treat black people it if he does it under cover of a genre that the critics mostly don't take seriously.
It might sound simplistic and patronising to suggest that Get Out probably wouldn't have performed so well had not #OscarsSoWhite (or maybe even #BlackLivesMatter, who knows) spurred the Academy into diversifying the age and ethnicity of its voters a couple of years ago, but it's probably true anyway.
One new (younger) Academy member told Vulture; “I had multiple conversations with longtime Academy members who were like, ‘That was not an Oscar film. And I’m like, ‘That’s bullshit. Watch it.’ "
Indeed.
The danger here of course is that the whole voting shake-up is not a progression but a reaction, that after the Academy have made enough concessions to the current political climate, the wind will change and they'll just react to some other cause too insistent to ignore. Business as usual.
But I have a dream! Wouldn't it be great if Hollywood didn't have to worry about the likes of Harvey Weinstein, or about consciousness-raising and inclusion riders. Wouldn't it be great if by some miracle the Oscars could forget about which way the political wind was blowing and instead decide to reward imagination, creative daring and visceral thrills over worthiness and the merits of past performances? Wouldn't it be great if 'our' films had the chance for recognition every year? Naive of me I know, but still...
Sources: Washington Post (Frederic March image), Guardian (Andrew Pulver & Gwylim Mumford: 'Radicalism Lite'), Vulture (Buchan, Hunt, Lee; 'We Polled the New Oscar Voters...'), Vox (Alissa Wilkinson: 'Why The Shape Of Water is a Natural Choice'), NY Times (Sopan Deb; 'Oscars 2018: Jimmy Kimmel's Opening Speech')
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