A powerful vision of a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.
For Your Consideration
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For Your Consideration
Best Picture
Produced By
A wonder to behold. Magical, thrilling and romantic to the core.
One of the finest movies of the year.
A Bold Romantic Masterpiece.
The Shape of Water is pure movie magic. It’s poignant, tender, funny, romantic, and flat-out breathtaking.
A Dazzling Dive into the Fantastic.
Altogether Wonderful!
Guillermo has a unique ability to go straight to the heart of things. He grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let you go. That’s the experience I went through making the film and I hope that’s the experience people have watching it.
That’s the beauty of film — when the costumes combine with the hair, makeup, lighting, sets and the actors it becomes something magical.
Guillermo has a love for our craft that is infectious. He would meet with us anytime, late on a Friday night or on a Sunday, and he was involved at every turn. It’s very rare that you find that kind of interest in being so super refined and for us, that kind of obsession is inspiring. We all wanted it to be the best it could possibly be. These days you’re very rarely given the opportunity to create something this unique.
Guillermo has a unique ability to communicate what he wants based on stuff that he's seen and also what’s in his mind. He gives you magical inspiration, then challenges you to bring your own ideas to the table, which is so rewarding.
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For Your Consideration
Best Director
A powerful vision by a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.
A marvelous film, richly realized and uniquely captivating. Del Toro’s devotion to this labor of love shows in every frame.
Del Toro imagines a whole world, one that has never existed before, and then creates it with meticulousness and fidelity that can inspire awe.
Unless Guillermo can feel your heart, he won't be satisfied. He wants to be moved in every frame. I think that is a gift to an actor. He invites you to rise to the very high level of his imagination.
To me, he’s like an old master with a vocabulary all his own. He creates stories that feel real but also have something more going on, something that speaks to life and art and love. He’s totally singular and that’s why all of us on set were ready to go to the wall for him.
When I met with Guillermo, he said this film was his dream project -- and I thought it would be foolish to pass up an opportunity to be part of his dream project because he is such a big dreamer.
As a filmmaker, he’s just an alchemist. He turns human themes into something otherworldly.
After reading the script I thought, ‘How are we ever going to shoot this?’ But then I talked to Guillermo and his vision was so strong, I started to believe it was possible. This film was both a big challenge and a fantastic experience for me.
For me, Guillermo is as much an artist as a director. It is the way in which those two things combine in him that makes his work so magical.
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For Your Consideration
Best Original Screenplay
With a poetry and rhythm that flows as strong as the currents of the world, Guillermo del Toro and co-writer Vanessa Taylor bring us a story of romance crossing boundaries, of the outsiders teaming up to defeat the status quo, and of the true beauty of life available to all.
Del Toro tells his story with such gushing enthusiasm…engulfing the viewer with intricate subplots and grandly poetic dialogue co-written by Vanessa Taylor.
A sensual and fantastical fairy tale with moral overtones, it’s a film that plays by all the rules and none of them, going its own way with fierce abandon.
I wanted this story to take the form of a fairytale in that you have a humble human who stumbles into something grander and more transcendtal than anything else in her life.
The idea of the movie is that love has no shape. You can fall in love with any person. You find a soul. Water has no shape until you put it in a container and it’s the strongest element on Earth. It’s the most malleable. I thought, 'that’s exactly what love is.' We are containers and water. You live in the shape love gives you. The glass of water or the pitcher or the cut or the bowl, the water perfectly fills that container, and I thought that was a great metaphor for love.
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For Your Consideration
Best Actress
An exquisite performance from Sally Hawkins that conveys both delicacy and strength.
Sally Hawkins conveys immense arcs of emotion through gesture and bearing alone. This is the kind of acting that makes you grateful you get to tag along and watch.
Sally Hawkins gives the best performance of her career.
Hawkins says more with her soulful eyes than she ever could with mere words.
I needed someone whose face is able to express every hue without a word. Sally has that kind of unique energy, so that is why I wrote [the role] for her. Sally is the most genuine, unaffected person and I don’t think she is capable of doing anything that isn’t emotionally real.
It’s so rare that you get a role that asks you to put it all out there, where it’s about unadulterated expression and words are not needed, and you have the freedom to express so much through your eyes, breath and body.
With Sally, it's all about what's going on behind the eyes. Guillermo knew he needed an incredibly instinctual actor to pull this off, and Sally is able to do so much with the smallest of expressions or gestures, with the way she moves and even the tone of her silence.
This is her movie, and I can't think of anyone else who could have played this part.
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For Your Consideration
Best Actor
The creature — portrayed with supreme elegance by Doug Jones — quickly captures Elisa’s heart, and ours too
The acting of Hawkins and Jones will haunt your dreams.
The richly drawn figures are played by a first-rate cast.
If you don't have an actor inside the creature’s suit, you don't have a movie — and Doug is not a performer, he’s an actor. I think of such moments as when he enters the movie theater and you realize the creature has never seen a movie before. Those are actor moments. He’s a fantastic actor with or without makeup.
Doug gives such an ingenious and beautiful performance and it had to be, because it’s such a fragile thing we explore. We’re two different species falling in love, but it had to feel real, and it had to be right. Luckily, I couldn’t help but fall in love with Doug the way he embodied this.
The biggest note Guillermo had for me was, 'I do not want you to be a stylized monster giving a performance. I want you to be an actor playing a role. You are going to be this woman’s love interest. You have to connect with her heart.'
Actor
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For Your Consideration
Best Supporting Actor
Del Toro’s pitch perfect ensemble also hammer home every beat and emotion, too. That’s hardly surprising because in Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer he has four of the best American actors working today.
Richard Jenkins is heartbreakingly good.
I told Richard I wanted Giles to be someone both hiding and defiant, a strong guy in a vulnerable position. Richard was just completely real, completely there, coming apart from the inside out.
Michael Shannon has the incredible precision of a classical English actor and at the same time the impulsiveness and immediacy of an American actor. He’s also capable of giving humanity to the most heinous of villains. I wanted you to see him go through things you wouldn’t normally see a villain go through: self-doubt, reflection and despair.
I saw in [Michael Stulhbarg] the ability to transform from a killer to a saint to a tragic figure and I knew he could create a composite character like Hoffstetler, who is on the one hand a very capable spy and on the other a compassionate, altruistic scientist capable of real sacrifice.
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For Your Consideration
Best Supporting Actress
Octavia Spencer is irresistible.
Octavia Spencer is as glorious as ever.
Octavia Spencer plays Zelda with delightful verve.
A lot of casting for me is in the eyes because 50% of acting is listening and looking. Each character in this film has a certain way of looking and I felt I needed Octavia’s eyes. She has a very powerful gaze. She is so entirely human and represents the best of what it is to be human with her spunk and her strength and her intelligence. When Octavia looks at you, you feel you are forgiven all your sins.
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For Your Consideration
Best Film Editing
Pure enchantment. 'The Shape of Water' is a visually and emotionally ravishing outsider tale of love and friendship molded by a master storyteller and lovingly steeped in vintage movie magic.
Guillermo created that language and he moves the camera. You can see where the transitions are planned. We’ll go from Michael Shannon in the car, cut to the water on the windshield and dissolve to the bathtub. It’s the same on the bus. Other scenes, we could find transitions and make them work on their own level. I didn’t do a watery cut to it because that’s all Guillermo.
Cinematography
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For Your Consideration
Best Cinematography
Dan Laustsen’s ethereal cinematography finds a thousand shades of green, once more amplifying the dreamlike fairy-tale atmosphere.
This film is a labor of love, a devotion that shows in every frame.
It’s full-hearted sincerity and warmth is reflected in every aspect of its craft, including Dan Laustsen’s luminous cinematography.
The final design of the creature is done with light. If I did not have a D.P. who understood that, it wouldn’t work. Dan also understands it's not just about key light, cross light, rim light, etcetera. He's not technical; he’s emotional. I think all great cinematographers are emotional. A great cinematographer is like an orchestra conductor – he transmits emotion with light instead of musical notes.
Everything’s in motion in the film. Guillermo wanted lots of camera movement, and he likes very precise movement, so we worked with all kinds of cranes, dollies and Steadicams, and it was very exciting.
Dan is a genius with light. In the same shot, sometimes [Lausten] lit the two apartments completely differently. Richard’s had a beautiful shaft of light entering through the window. It felt always at dusk or at dawn, very poetic in a way. Sally’s felt underwater, almost like a fish tank. Dan is extraordinary at achieving this. I think it’s not just visual – it is for me character storytelling.
Design
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For Your Consideration
Best Production Design
Paul D. Austerberry’s production design is a triumph.
Visually and Stylistically, 'The Shape of Water' is a rapture.
★★★★★ This is the most beautiful film of the year, both in body and spirit, and it is not to be missed.
I fell in love with the fact that Paul has a very strong opinion of design, meaning he could counter anything I talked about with new ideas. But even though Paul has great ideas, he’s also very practical and that was important because this film had such a big scope, with complex sets and underwater shooting. He had to be able to orchestrate and manage all that.
Guillermo always says you first need to make a place grounded in reality in order for it to become fantastical, so we were as authentic to the period as we could be in the story.
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For Your Consideration
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
A poetic love letter to misunderstood creatures filled with magic and extraordinary visual imagination.
A ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore.
I needed someone whose face is able to express every hue without a word. Sally has that kind of unique energy, so that is why I wrote [the role] for her. Sally is the most genuine, unaffected person and I don’t think she is capable of doing anything that isn’t emotionally real.
Elisa isn’t a person who has a lot of clothes, so she needed just a few pieces, but very special pieces. She is in blues and greens, watery colors, for the most part. There is a little red only near the end of the film, signifying a shift in her resolve.
I wanted to do a kind of a bruised fruit palette for Octavia so it would feel very different from Sally’s character and different from all the other female characters in the film as well. This underscores the idea of Zelda as a bright, vibrant woman constrained by the pervasive sexism and social prejudice of the day.
Strickland was on the top of the current style notes. In early discussions, we wanted to have the character be imposing, which was not hard given Michael’s height. But I also wanted to broaden him out, so the shoulders of his suits were brought out slightly.
Giles is basically warm tones. The backstory to him was his life kind of stood still, given the fact that he was basically not making a ton of money. A lot of his clothing is clothing from the '50s. Everything of his is worn out.
For Hofstetter’s wardrobe, Sequeira created two slightly different looks to emphasize his double agent status. 'We shifted the color from cool deep tones to warm deep tones depending on where he was. If he’s working at the compound, he was in cool tones. When he saw the Russians, he was moved to brown and green.'
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For Your Consideration
BEST MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING
’The Shape of Water’ looks amazing. There’s not a detail unconsidered or design element unrefined.
It was the longest design I’ve ever done. The difficulty with this creature is that we were not just sculpting a creature – we were sculpting a leading man. Mike Hill has a way to not sculpt figures but sculpt living things. We started sculpting many, many busts and figures, trying to see what made an amphibian man an amphibian man, trying to find the essence of that. For me, a creative is not one single design. It’s drafts, like a screenplay.
He said he wanted me to give the creature a soul. He wanted it to be something a woman could fall head over heels for in every way. So I started sketching a handsome looking version of a fish man, giving him kissable lips, a square jaw and doe eyes and I went from there.
These days you’re very rarely given the opportunity to create something this unique. We live in the digital age when it would be very easy for other directors or producers to say, ‘ just make it a guy in a motion capture suit, and we’ll do it all CGI.’ The compelling fact is that when you’ve got something real on set, and the actors can really sense it and feel it and the cinematographer can light it, there is something to be said for that.
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For Your Consideration
BEST SOUND MIXING
The Shape of Water is pure movie magic. It’s poignant, tender, funny, romantic, and flat-out breathtaking.
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For Your Consideration
Best Sound Editing
The Shape of Water is pure movie magic. It’s poignant, tender, funny, romantic, and flat-out breathtaking.
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For Your Consideration
Best Original Score
ALEXANDRE DESPLAT’S SCORE IS LUSH AND ROMANTIC, PERFECTLY UNDERSCORING THE FILM’S TONE.
It's full-hearted sincerity and warmth is reflected in every aspect of its craft, including Alexandre Desplat’s elegantly swooning score.
Tender, funny, romantic, and flat-out breathtaking. Like Nothing you've ever seen before — or dreamed that you ever wanted to see. It's pure movie magic.
Alexandre truly understood the movie and its essence. A good composer flows with the camera moves and the emotion of the moment — and I find Alexandre’s punctuation of those things is impeccable. Great scoring always adds another layer to the story, and Alexandre knows how to integrate music with dialogue, action and sound design.
I think it’s a beautiful love story. But the crucial thing for me creatively is that I was really stunned by the fluidity of the camera. It's always in motion so you have a sensation like water in the flow of the movie. There’s nothing more inspiring for music than a story that flows because you can just surf on it. This story was very special on that level.
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For Your Consideration
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Visually and Stylistically, ‘The Shape of Water' is a rapture.
‘SHAPE OF WATER’ is a stunner. You’ve never seen anything quite like this spellbinding tale.
The Shape of Water features roughly 600 VFX, a significant number for a relatively budgeted film, though most of the enhancements are so subtle they’re likely to go unnoticed by the average viewer.
Our hope is that the audience can't distinguish at all between the digital version of the creature or the Doug Jones version. Doug's performance informs our animation and I think our animation has also informed how Doug was photographed. If the audience can’t tell which is which, we will have succeeded.
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