The Best Picture 2017! “The Shape Of Water!”

Bravo to Director Guillermo Del Toro, who won the Best Picture Oscar at the 2018 Academy Awards!

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock (9448601hq)
Guillermo del Toro, winner of the award for best director for “The Shape of Water” celebrates in the audience at the Oscars, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles
90th Academy Awards – Show, Los Angeles, USA – 04 Mar 2018

Del Toro also took home the award for Best Director, on a magical film that Fox Searchlight describes this way:

“An otherworldly fable set against the backdrop of Cold War era America circa 1962. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she works, lonely Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is trapped in a life of isolation. Elisa’s life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) discover a secret classified experiment. Rounding out the cast are Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Doug Jones.”

Here is the trailer:

If you haven’t seen it yet, “The Shape Of Water” is intense, emotional, and above all, a story about inclusion and love.

In many films with a “creature”, the Director teases the audience for long periods of time; not so here. Del Toro introduces his lead character early on, and Actress Sally Hawkins shows us the creature’s humanity, even as the film takes on a brutal tone…

The entire cast is terrific. As Guillermo del Toro said about Sally Hawkins:

“Not only was she the first choice, she was the only choice. I wrote the movie for Sally, I wrote the movie for Michael [Shannon]… Sally is, I wanted the character of Elisa to be beautiful, in her own way, not in a way that is like a perfume commercial kind of way. That you could believe that this character, this woman would be sitting next to you on the bus. But at the same time she would have a luminosity, a beauty, almost magical, ethereal.”

Each person brings a full range of emotion to their characters – Shannon is terrific as usual, as is veteran character Actor Richard Jenkins…

According to great trivia from the website IMDB, most of the characters were written with the actors in mind. Octavia Spencer said her character was reminiscent of a collaboration between her roles in The Help (2011) and Hidden Figures (2016), and that she “would have played the desk if Guillermo del Toro had asked me to”.

Spencer also received an Academy Award nomination for her work in the film.

It’s important to note the film is “R” rated – for sexuality and violence, but the brutality of the cold war scenes are balanced out by warmth and humanity across multiple characters – this is the best film of the year, and bravo to Director Del Toro for matching his wild creativity with the warmth and heart that the film achieves…

Del Toro loves fantasy, and he’s a huge fan of Brian DePalma’s “Phantom Of The Paradise” – on this special edition blu-ray of the classic 1974 film, he even leads a lengthy conversation with the film’s star and composer Paul Williams…check it out here:

https://johnrieber.com/2014/02/27/cult-classic-phantom-of-the-paradise-guillermo-del-toro-talks-up-paul-williams-great-new-special-edition/

If you want to see more of Sally Hawkins, she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress in 2013 for Woody Allen’s last great film “Blue Jasmine”:

See more about her work in that film here:

https://johnrieber.com/2013/09/01/blue-jasmine-best-film-of-2013-woody-allens-bumpy-road-to-brilliance/

Bravo again to “The Shape Of Water!”

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock (9448601hq)
Guillermo del Toro, winner of the award for best director for “The Shape of Water” celebrates in the audience at the Oscars, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles
90th Academy Awards – Show, Los Angeles, USA – 04 Mar 2018

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