Oscar nods celebrate outsiders; 'Shape of Water' leads list with 13 nominations

Octavia Spencer (left) and Sally Hawkins both were nominated for Oscars for their roles in The Shape of Water, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War tale about a mute office cleaner who falls in love with an amphibious creature.
Octavia Spencer (left) and Sally Hawkins both were nominated for Oscars for their roles in The Shape of Water, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War tale about a mute office cleaner who falls in love with an amphibious creature.

NEW YORK -- The Academy Awards showered outsiders, on screen and off, with milestone-setting nominations that celebrated Guillermo del Toro's full-hearted ode to outcasts The Shape of Water, embraced first-time filmmakers like Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele, and made Mudbound director of photography Rachel Morrison the first woman ever nominated for best cinematography.

Leading all nominees with 13 nods, including best picture, was The Shape of Water, by veteran Mexican filmmaker del Toro, whose Cold War-era fantasy is about a mute office cleaner (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an amphibious creature. But the nominations also carried forward some of the ongoing reckoning of the Me Too movement that has been felt especially acutely in Hollywood, where male filmmakers outnumber women by a ratio of approximately 12-to-1.

Gerwig, the writer-director of the nuanced coming-of-age tale Lady Bird, became just the fifth woman nominated for best director, following Lina Wertmuller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow, the sole woman to win, for The Hurt Locker. Speaking by phone Tuesday from Los Angeles, Gerwig said the distinction was extremely meaningful.

"When I think about Kathryn Bigelow winning and me sitting there watching it and feeling suddenly like, 'It's possible,'" said Gerwig. "To be nominated as the fifth woman, I hope that what it does is that women of all ages look at it and they also find the spark within themselves that says: 'Now I have to go make my movie.'"

Reader poll

Which film do you think should win best picture?

  • Call Me by Your Name 6%
  • Darkest Hour 17%
  • Dunkirk 11%
  • Get Out 17%
  • Lady Bird 0%
  • Phantom Thread 11%
  • The Post 0%
  • The Shape of Water 11%
  • Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri 28%

18 total votes.

List of nominees

Best Picture: "Call Me by Your Name," ''Darkest Hour," ''Dunkirk," ''Get Out," ''Lady Bird," ''Phantom Thread," ''The Post," ''The Shape of Water,""Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri."

Actor: Timothee Chalamet, "Call Me by Your Name"; Daniel Day-Lewis, "Phantom Thread"; Daniel Kaluuya, "Get Out"; Gary Oldman, "Darkest Hour"; Denzel Washington," Roman J. Israel, Esq."

Actress: Sally Hawkins, "The Shape of Water"; Frances McDormand, "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri"; Margot Robbie in "I, Tonya"; Saoirse Ronan in "Lady Bird"; Meryl Streep in "The Post."

Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe, "The Florida Project"; Woody Harrelson, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"; Richard Jenkins, "The Shape of Water"; Christopher Plummer, "All the Money in the World"; Sam Rockwell, "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri."

Supporting Actress: Mary J. Blige, "Mudbound"; Allison Janney,"I, Tonya"; Lesley Manville, "Phantom Thread"; Laurie Metcalf, "Lady Bird"; Octavia Spencer, "The Shape of Water."

Directing: "Dunkirk," Christopher Nolan; "Get Out," Jordan Peele; "Lady Bird," Greta Gerwig; "Phantom Thread," Paul Thomas Anderson; "The Shape of Water," Guillermo del Toro.

Foreign Language Film: "A Fantastic Woman," Chile;"The Insult" Lebanon; "Loveless," Russia;"On Body and Soul," Hungary;"The Square" Sweden.

Adapted Screenplay: "Call Me By Your Name," ''The Disaster Artist," ''Logan," Molly's Game," ''Mudbound."

Original Screenplay: "The Big Sick," ''Get Out," ''Lady Bird," ''The Shape of Water," ''Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri."

Animated Feature Film: "The Boss Baby," ''The Breadwinner," ''Coco," ''Ferdinand": "Loving Vincent."

Production Design: "Beauty and the Beast," ''Blade Runner 2049," ''Darkest Hour," ''Dunkirk, "The Shape of Water."

Cinematography: "Blade Runner 2049," ''Darkest Hour," ''Dunkirk," ''Mudbound," ''The Shape of Water."

Sound Mixing: "Baby Driver," ''Blade Runner 2049," ''Dunkirk," ''The Shape of Water," ''Star Wars: The Last Jedi."

Sound Editing: "Baby Driver," ''Blade Runner 2049," ''Dunkirk," ''The Shape of Water," ''Star Wars: The Last Jedi."

Original Score: "Dunkirk," Hans Zimmer; "Phantom Thread," Jonny Greenwood; "The Shape of Water" Alexandre Desplat;"Star Wars: The Last Jedi," John Williams; "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri," Carter Burwell.

Original Song: "Mighty River" from "Mudbound";''Mystery Of Love" from "Call Me by Your Name"; "Remember Me" from "Coco"; "Stand Up For Something" from "Marshall"; "This Is Me" from "The Greatest Showman."

Documentary Feature: "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail,""Faces Places," ''Icarus," ''Last Men in Aleppo," ''Strong Island"

Documentary (short subject): "Edith+Eddie," ''Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405," ''Heroin(e)," ''Knife Skills," ''Traffic Stop"

Film Editing: "Baby Driver," ''Dunkirk," ''I, Tonya," ''The Shape of Water," ''Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri"

Makeup and Hairstyling: "Darkest Hour," ''Victoria & Abdul," ''Wonder."

Animated Short Film: "Dear Basketball," ''Garden Party," ''Lou," ''Negative Space," ''Revolting Rhymes."

Live Action Short Film: "DeKalb Elementary," ''The Eleven O'Clock," ''My Nephew Emmett," ''The Silent Child," ''Watu Wote/All of Us."

Visual Effects: "Blade Runner 2049," ''Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2," ''Kong: Skull Island," ''Star Wars: The Last Jedi," ''War for the Planet of the Apes."

Costume Design: "Beauty and the Beast," Jacqueline Durran; "Darkest Hour," Jacqueline Durran; "Phantom Thread," Mark Bridges; "The Shape of Water"; Luis Sequeira; "Victoria & Abdul" Consolata Boyle.

In what's been a wide-open awards season, Oscar voters chose nine best-picture nominees, including four with female protagonists: The Shape of Water, Lady Bird; Martin McDonaugh's rage-fueled comic drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Peele's horror sensation Get Out; Joe Wright's Winston Churchill drama Darkest Hour; Steven Spielberg's timely newspaper drama The Post; Christopher Nolan's World War II epic Dunkirk; Luca Guadagnino's tender love story Call Me By Your Name; and Paul Thomas Anderson's twisted romance Phantom Thread.

Peele becomes the fifth black filmmaker nominated for best director, and the third to helm a best-picture nominee, following Barry Jenkins last year for Moonlight. He's also the third person to receive best-picture, director and writing nods for his first feature film after Warren Beatty (Heaven Can Wait) and James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment).

"I'm going to write. I'm now going to get hard at work on the next one," Peele said by phone. "One of the greatest things that I get from this whole process is this faith in my voice. It's like jet fuel."

The Shape of Water landed just shy of tying the record of 14 nominations, scoring a wide array of nominations for its cast (Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer), del Toro's directing, its sumptuous score (by Alexandre Desplat) and its technical craft.

"You realize that we are all, in some way or another, a bit of an outsider in different ways," said del Toro of his film's resonance. "Not fearing the other but embracing the other is the only way to go as a race. The urgency of that message of hope and emotion is what sustained the faith for roughly half a decade that the movie needed to be made."

All of the acting front-runners -- Frances McDormand (Three Billboards), Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards) -- landed their expected nominations. But there were plenty of surprises in the nominations announced from Los Angeles ahead of the March 4 ceremony, to be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel.

There were eight first-time acting nominees, including 22-year-old Call Me By Your Name breakthrough Timothee Chalamet and Daniel Kaluuya, 28, of Get Out. Saoirse Ronan, 23, landed her third Oscar nod, for Lady Bird.

Christopher Plummer, who replaced Kevin Spacey in Ridley Scott's All the Money in the World, also sneaked into the best-supporting-actor category. Added to the film in reshoots little more than a month before the film's release, 88-year-old Plummer is the oldest acting nominee ever.

Three Billboards scored seven nominations Tuesday, behind only The Shape of Water and Dunkirk. The World War II epic, thus far little-honored in Hollywood's awards season, emerged especially strong with Oscar voters, taking eight nominations, many of them in technical categories. It's Nolan's first nomination for best director.

Information for this article was contributed by Sandy Cohen of The Associated Press.

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Invision/AP file photo

In this Nov. 7, 2017 file photo, writer-director Greta Gerwig poses for a portrait to promote her film, "Lady Bird" in New York.

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Invision/AP file photo

In this Feb. 9, 2017 file photo, Jordan Peele poses for a portrait to promote his film, "Get Out," in Los Angeles.

A Section on 01/24/2018

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