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Why The Shape Of Water Was The First Sci-Fi Movie To Win Best Picture
Here's why The Shape of Water was the first sci-fi movie to win Best Pictures at the Oscars. The term Oscar Bait gets thrown around a lot (going back to when it was coined in the mid-20th century), but it refers to a very real thing. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to favor certain types of films over others, particularly those deemed important because of their subject matter, like historical biopics or docudramas. As a result, studios will often schedule these types of movies to hit theaters sometime over the last four months of any given year - when critic circles begin announcing their annual best-of lists - in a bid to improve their prospects at the Academy Awards.
Even when these movies are seemingly produced for the primary purpose of landing Oscar nominations, it doesn't mean they're necessarily artistically hollow. For example, it's likely Sam Mendes' WWI thriller 1917 was green-lit in no small part because its studio backers felt it had the potential to land attention from the Academy (which it did, taking home three Oscars, including a win for Roger Deakins' cinematography). And yet, despite it being obvious Oscar Bait, many critics felt it was also a powerful depiction of the mindless destruction of war and humanity's capacity for decency, even under the bleakest of circumstances.
Increasingly, as the Academy has diversified its ranks in recent years, there've been more and more big winners that go against the grain, as far as the types of films typically considered Oscar Bait go. At the 2020 ceremony, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite became the first non-English language movie to win Best Picture, and only two years before that Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water became the first sci-fi film to win the honor. Today, we're going to look at why it took so long for the latter to happen. (Recall, 2018's Oscars was the 90th iteration overall.)
The Oscars Are Historically Biased Against Genre Films
It's not a reach to claim the Academy has been historically biased against genre movies; their track record speaks for itself. Including The Shape of Water, only a dozen sci-fi films have even been nominated for Best Picture, and some of the more famous sci-fi movies of the 20th century (like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner) didn't even land a nod. The number is even smaller when it comes to horror films nominated for Best Picture, with The Silence of the Lambs being the only one to ever win (not including The Shape of Water, itself a hybrid of genres). Elsewhere, Black Panther is the only comic book superhero movie ever nominated for the Academy's top honor (assuming you don't count Joker), and The Return of the King is the only fantasy title to win Best Picture (again, not counting The Shape of Water). When it comes to different mediums, only three animated movies have been nominated for the top prize, but none of them won, and all three were made by either Disney or Pixar.
The Academy's bias even extends to comedy, if to a lesser degree. Comedies of manners like Annie Hall or dark satires along the lines of Birdman are far more likely to be nominated for (and, in those cases, win) the Best Picture Oscar that equally well-received, yet broader comedies along the lines of Edgar Wright's Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy (or, going back way further, Charlie Chaplin's physical comedy-driven classics City Lights and Modern Times). Subject matter can also be a major deciding factor when it comes to a comedy's ability to gain traction with the Academy. Case in point: Taika Waititi's WWII satire Jojo Rabbit was the filmmaker's first movie nominated for Best Picture, despite it being much more divisive than a number of his previous films, including (perhaps tellingly) his acclaimed horror-comedy What We Do in the Shadows.
Why The Oscars Expanded To Include Popular Movies
In 2009, the Academy announced it was expanding the number of potential Best Picture Oscar nominees annually from five to ten, beginning with that year's contenders. Officially, the move was done to allow even more deserving films to be nominated for the honor than before, as opposed to being a response to a specific movie being snubbed. Unofficially, however, it's long been agreed the Academy did this in reaction to The Dark Knight being locked out of the Best Picture race a year earlier. Being both a sequel and a superhero film, it wasn't all that shocking when Christopher Nolan's tentpole was overlooked by the organization, despite also being easily one of the most widely-celebrated offerings of 2008 (and even winning an Oscar for the late Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker). Even so, the Academy seemed to recognize it would need to start recognizing more populist fare moving forward, lest the Oscars lose even more of its cultural relevance after decades of leaving genre movies out in the cold for the top prizes.
At first, the move worked: popular sci-fi tentpoles like District 9, Avatar, and Inception were all nominated for Best Picture within the next two years, along with the animated films Up and Toy Story 3. After that, though, things began to revert back to the previous status quo (as far as the type of movies nominated for Best Picture are concerned), due to a combination of the Academy's preferential voting system and their decision to revise the rule so only five to ten features have to be nominated for Best Picture. Because of this, less conventional awards contenders like Mad Max: Fury Road and Black Panther have found their way into the Best Picture race since then, but are still the exceptions to the rule. With viewership continuing to diminish for the annual Oscar ceremony, the Academy once again revised their rule this year to guarantee at least 10 movies are nominated for Best Picture, starting in 2022.
Why The Shape Of Water Won Best Picture In 2017
Interestingly enough, The Shape of Water was considered to be the lead contender to win Best Picture, even before it did. A Creature From the Black Lagoon-inspired blend of monster horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, del Toro's movie check off most of the boxes that traditionally rule genre films out of the running for the Academy's top prize (to mention nothing of the fact it's a movie where a human woman has sex with a fish-man). At the same time, it's an unabashed love letter to Hollywood's Golden Age and explores themes of discrimination against people based on their race, gender, and/or sexual orientation in a way that usually plays well with the Academy. So, as much as The Shape of Water seems like a left-field choice to take home Best Picture, a closer look reveals it's very much cut from the same cloth as so many notable Oscar winners before it.
For similar reasons, The Shape of Water was actually regarded as the safe choice for Best Picture, the year it came out. After years of overlooking del Toro for his work on fantastical political allegories like The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, the Academy was under all he more pressure to recognize his contributions to the art of cinema at some point, and The Shape of Water was as good a time as any to do that. Arguably, the film was also easier for the Academy to swallow than Get Out, a fellow horror movie nominated for Best Picture that same year - albeit, one that looks at racism in its modern form, especially among supposedly progressive white liberals (a group that many members of the Academy belong to). Working in tandem, these factors were enough to inspire the organization to finally do what it had never done before and hand its top prize over to a sci-fi film.
