Handicapping This Year's Best Picture Oscar Nominees

By Steve Evans

Out of nine Best Picture nominees this year, The Shape of Water is favored to win tomorrow night. It’s lavishly produced, weird and strangely compelling in its love story.

Because the Academy has been quirky of late, I’ll say Shape will indeed win.

Here’s my annual effort to break down the contenders and handicap the race. Let me be clear. These thoughts have less to do with artistic merit than with Oscar politics, past trends and an intuitive sense of how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chooses Oscar winners for maximum self-aggrandizement...so:

Jordan Peele's Get Out, a thriller with horror and science fiction elements, was probably the most profitable film of the year with a $252 million-plus worldwide gross against a $4.5 million budget. It's scary and funny, and the makers of the film pushed hard after the fact to play up the picture as a racial allegory, instead of just leaving it as a black comedy, yeah, pun intended. Instead, the film comes off as a reverse-racist polemic to some viewers. Controversy might be good for box office, though seldom for Academy Awards. And despite the ignorance of film critics hailing Get Out for originality, the picture is highly derivative of films like The Clonus Horror, Coma and The Island. Get Out and freshman director Peele will have to settle for the honor of nominations only. He now has the clout to make plenty more films and establish a track record that could lead to an eventual win.

Dunkirk and Darkest Hour – both stories of Brits during World War II – will cancel each other out.

Call Me by Your Name is handicapped by the fact that a film about gay boys won Best Picture last year, and Hollywood is not inclined to overdo it.

Lady Bird is a sweet little comedy-drama about a gal’s coming of age in the shadow of a difficult mother. But that’s it. The film just…ends. Not nearly enough gravitas for a Best Picture win.

The Post and Phantom Thread are both prestige productions directed by and starring some of the top talent working today. Problem is, neither found a wide audience. The Post is overwrought with odd character quirks, which are distracting, and a focus on so much inside baseball about newspaper operations that the greater issue at stake is obscured. Scotch that one. Phantom is reputed to be Daniel Day-Lewis’ acting swansong – and he may just pull an upset for Best Actor over Gary Oldman, but in the age of #MeToo the film’s tale of toxic masculinity is not going to sit well with Academy voters ever conscious of appearances.

That leaves Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.  Any other year, this would be the runaway favorite. It’s got bleeding-edge social issues, powerhouse acting and delivers an unflinching look at rural America. But. As some critics have observed, this is also a black comedy directed by a Brit, taking some easy potshots at America’s rural South. My point is, the tone of the film is off, never quite believable, though the actors try mightily to sell the story. In sum, it’s flawed.

So we’re left with The Shape of Water, the strange story of a mute woman in love with an aquatic lizard man who escapes his government captors. This is what you get when you cross The Fugitive with The Creature from the Black Lagoon, only this time the gal is not screaming and has even brought her own condoms. I made up that last part. On balance, this is high fantasy, beautifully produced and powerfully romantic, plus it delivers a unique twist on some familiar cinematic tropes. All of this is a semi-fancy way of saying The Shape of Water is a novelty of pure escapism that puts a balm on the frayed nerves of modern moviegoers living in a surreal world of their own with Trump, Kim Jong, et. al. doing crazy things most every day.  Count on The Shape of Water to win.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2018 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.