The Shape of Water, a movie about a lady who falls in love with an aquatic beast, has been hailed as a movie promoting diversity. And I’m very confused.
“‘The Shape of Water’ Wins Best Picture as Oscars Project Diversity,” said The New York Times after the flick won the Academy Award this month for Best Picture. The Guardian proclaimed: “A battle cry for inclusion: The Shape of Water triumphs in Oscars of seismic change.” According to the BBC, it was appropriate that this “call for the marginalised to band together against white patriarchy should be victorious.”
To recap: The Shape of Water is about a white woman. Who falls for a fish. Who turns out to be her Prince Charming. It’s essentially the same story as the Frog Prince, Swamp Thing, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and every other monster mashup from King Kong to Beauty and the Beast. This is the best Hollywood can do to promote diversity?
Supposedly, this “diversity” award also had something to do with the Mexican nationality of The Shape of Water’s director, Guillermo del Toro, who also won an individual Oscar for Best Director. But Mexican men have been consistently winning this category, taking the award four times in the past five years! (The other winners were Alejandro Inarritu for Birdman in 2015 and The Revenant in 2016, and Alfonso Cuaron for Gravity in 2014.) Giving del Toro the award promoted dominance, not diversity.
If the Oscars were all about diversity, then why not give an award to Greta Gerwig for directing the much better Lady Bird? She’d have been only the second woman to ever win (after Kathryn Bigelow, who got the Oscar in 2010 for Hurt Locker). Why not give it to Jordan Peele for directing the even better film Get Out, which, in a subversive way, made me think about what it’s like to be a minority in America today? Peele would have been the first black man (or woman) to win Best Director.
Instead, the legacy of the 2018 Oscars is a merman flick.
It’s not that I disliked The Shape of Water. I just didn’t think it was all that ground-breaking or diversity-promoting. It was a fun film, but shallow and didactic, “a film of surface sheen, from the nostalgic gloss of its production design, to the conventionality of the plotting, to the patent obviousness of its theme,” according to this review in the Canadian magazine MacLean’s. Of course you’ll sympathize with a mute cleaning lady or an exiled gay artist or an abused Gill-man. Of course you’ll root for them in a fight against cartoonish villains.
Meanwhile, the artistic power in a genre-defying movie like Get Out was to challenge our sympathies and biases and force us to get outside ourselves. The director created a world where nobody was what they appeared, on several levels. Says MacLean’s: “Its horror and satire trappings don’t diminish, but rather enlarge, the film’s importance.”
Perhaps I’m just asking for too much. It’s not like the Academy Awards bestow any kind of god-like imprimatur on a film. It’s easy to start listing lame Best Picture winners: the melodramatic Titanic (1997), the cheesy Shakespeare in Love (1998)… and now The Shape of Water (2018).
