Get Out should have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards last year. This is not a controversial statement.
Most Oscar bloggers and film critics recognized early in last year’s race that the 2018 award would go not to Jordan Peele’s subversive masterpiece but to Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water. Although the latter film was generally well-liked, hardly anyone wanted to defend its merits come Oscar time. That it would win was a foregone conclusion; that it would not deserve the award was just as well. After Moonlight’s shocking (and unusually accurate) win in 2017, bloggers and pundits characterized the inevitable choice of Del Toro’s film over Get Out as the conservative branch of Oscar voters rearing their ugly heads.
In the year since, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone write about Del Toro’s film without palpable disdain. I don’t even think I’ve seen anyone reference it without using the words “fish-fucking.”
The Shape of Water was not my favorite Oscar nominee of last year, not even my second or third favorite, but its win was no fiasco. It might even be a step in the right direction.
Get Out was the rare great movie to earn awards attention and real money on a shoestring budget — $176 millon domestically against a $4.5 million in production costs — but popularity has always been of dubious importance to the Academy. Even if the film seeped so completely into mainstream culture that ‘Sunken Place’ GIF’s were a regular fixture within days of its release, the Oscars have never been about what seeps into the culture.
Sometimes the Academy’s tastes line up perfectly with that of the film-going public and a movie like Titanic is anointed the chosen one. This is an increasingly rare scenario. Even a film like Black Panther, despite its critical bona fides and big money, has fairly low odds for winning Best Picture. So does Bradley Cooper’s meme-factory, A Star is Born.
It’s not that popularity doesn’t matter at all, but to win Best Picture a film must be popular with a specific audience: Oscar voters. They do not read blog-posts like this. Traditionally, they like stuff with historical resonance, beloved stars, big emotions, and/or flattering reminders of cinema’s importance — movies that tell them they are doing something important with their Sunday afternoon — and they will watch the Oscars telecast come hell or high water, come host or no host.
For this reason, most Best Picture winners are disposable. Of the last twenty, only a few have stood the test of even five or ten years. When is the last time you really thought about A Beautiful Mind? Slumdog Millionaire? I loved Spotlight at the time, but now, a mere three years later, I can’t remember if it was a deadly serious docudrama or one very long joke about Mark Ruffalo.
We don’t often expect the award to go to the year’s highest expression of the art of cinema. The Academy is famously unconcerned with rewarding master filmmakers at the peak of their powers — if they were, Scorsese might have won for Goodfellas or Raging Bull or Taxi Driver, not for The Departed (a movie set in Boston, of all places).
I wouldn’t call The Shape of Water disposable — if it is imperfect, it is also quite unique. It might not be Del Toro’s masterpiece, but it is a serious work by a master filmmaker. It has the same flaws that plague Del Toro’s best movies — elaborate coincidences, heavy underscoring, a general distaste for subtlety and the laws of physics. It is also a deft subversion of a genre that has always obsessed Del Toro — the fifties creature feature — which turns the hero of those films, the brave, strong, white American G-man, into the villain.
The film ruminates on themes which have always appealed to Del Toro — escapism, authoritarianism, oppression, disobedience, deviant eroticism — while reframing the paranoid imperialist subtext of the cold war era sci-fi that this auteur adores and abhors in equal measure. It is cleverly cast with beloved actors — not stars — who deliver performances oscillating from gorgeously nuanced to wildly over-the-top. Finally, it is a visual knockout, suffused with swampy green and deep blue and bright red blood.
To be sure: The Shape of Water is a tearjerker with more than a few self-congratulatory gestures meant to hit lovers of old Hollywood right in the feels. It is also a genre picture that opens with a masturbation scene. It’s a lot of things, but I don’t think you can call it square.
A note on the Academy’s preferential ballot: voters do not simply choose their favorite film — they rank the nominees for Best Picture. If any film manages to be at the very top of at least 50% of the ballots, the race is over. Otherwise, the film with the fewest number one votes is automatically eliminated from the race, which means that all the people who’d ranked, say, The Post, at the top of their list have their second choice turned into their first. This process goes on until one movie can secure over 50% of the vote.
Since the Academy never releases their voting data, no one knows exactly what film received the highest number of initial number one votes. However, as Glenn Whipp from the LA Times pointed out last year, the preferential ballot system means, technically, that the least hated movie is the one that will win Best Picture.
To take this a step further: Let’s say that Get Out received 30% of the number one votes for Best Picture — more than any other film. Another significant percentage of the voting body ranked the movie in the bottom half of their list, as they refused to reward a straight genre film. Let’s say that Dunkirk, The Post, and The Darkest Hour were cut out of the race for a low percentage of number one votes. And then, let’s say that The Shape of Water received 25% of the number one votes. It would need to secure only 25% of the combined second, third, and fourth place votes in order to win.
I don’t know if Del Toro’s film initially received the highest percentage of number one votes — frankly, I find it a little hard to imagine. But I can imagine the same crowd that loved Lady Bird, Get Out, and Call Me By Your Name feeling at least a little warmth for The Shape of Water, enough to rank it higher than the stodgy historical dramas that the Oscars traditionally awards.
Would that kind of love have been enough to send the cast and crew for The Shape of Water to the stage at 12:11 PM EST? Probably not. This means the voters we imagine to be more “conservative” had to rank The Shape of Water, a sci-fi movie featuring a fish-man who eats a cat and makes sweet love to Sally Hawkins, over films that might fit the bill for a more traditional Best Picture winner.
The Post was also nominated. So was The Darkest Hour. Ten years ago, even with the preferential ballot, one of those two films would have won. The violent genre picture that doubles as an exploration of a middle-aged disabled woman’s sexuality would never have stood a chance.
The Shape of Water will not age as well as Get Out, but its Best Picture win won’t curdle like the sour milk of Crash. It is a far better winner than, say, Argo — can you imagine a movie starring Ben Affleck as a man named Tony Mendez winning Best Picture in February 2019?
That’s almost worse than a win for Darkest Hour or Three Billboards would have been last year, though maybe not as bad as a win for Green Book or Bohemian Rhapsody would be this year. If either of those movies takes home the prize, we’ll have something worth complaining about. Until then, we could all afford to be a little more forward thinking about the fish-fucking.
