The 90th Academy Awards were a strange, somewhat muted affair low on surprises—perhaps exactly what Hollywood wanted after the chaos of last year’s ceremony. The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s at once gentle and darkly violent fable of love between a mute woman and an amphibious creature, won four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director, but the wealth was pretty evenly spread among the big contenders. In many ways, Shape felt like a less polarizing “consensus” choice for the Academy, which is itself a sign of how much the film industry has changed in recent years.
The Shape of Water also won for its score and its production design. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Martin McDonagh’s grim tale of grief and revenge, won acting awards for Frances McDormand (Best Actress) and Sam Rockwell (Best Supporting Actor). Darkest Hour took Best Actor for Gary Oldman, while Jordan Peele won Best Original Screenplay for Get Out, James Ivory won Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name, and Dunkirk collected three technical awards (Film Editing, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing). The biggest tragedy of the night was Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird missing out on an Oscar—its best shot, Laurie Metcalf, lost Best Supporting Actress to Allison Janney from I, Tonya.
Jimmy Kimmel’s second hosting job in a row felt a little more anonymous than last year’s. He repeated his stunt of connecting famous audience members with regular moviegoers (this time bringing stars from the Dolby Theatre to a nearby cinema to surprise folks). But his monologue jokes were largely pretty safe. He tackled the ongoing issue of misogyny and sexual assault in Hollywood by broadly encouraging change and praising the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, and didn’t spend much time raking the industry over the coals.
The ceremony’s most memorable moment was probably McDormand accepting her trophy and bidding the other female nominees of the night to stand up for applause. It was a spontaneous, powerful idea but also a stark visual—the number of people standing up felt very small within the vast Dolby Theatre crowd. Peele’s victory, the only one of the night for Get Out, was a mild surprise that also drew a standing ovation. Similarly welcome were victories for cinematic stalwarts like Ivory and the cinematographer Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049), who had never won an Oscar before despite multiple nominations. All in all, it wasn’t the most exciting night, but it was also largely free of major screw-ups or awkward speeches; not a ceremony to be remembered like last year’s, perhaps, but one with a few lovely moments to hold onto.
—David Sims
from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2I5p8R0
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