Star Wars wasn’t good enough. Close Encounters of the Third Kind couldn’t do it. Blade Runner, E.T., and 2001: A Space Oddyssey didn’t make it. WALL-E, King Kong, Forbidden Planet, Farenheit 451, and Jurassic Park lost the race. War of the Worlds, Minority Report and A.I. made millions, but were shut out of Hollywood’s biggest prize. But tonight, after ninety years — you read that right, nearly a century — the Oscar for Best Picture went to a science fiction film.
For. The. First. Time.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences first handed out prizes for film achievement in 1927, at a meeting organized by Louis B. Mayer. For the next ninety years, as the industry grew and changed, science fiction movies came to be the reliable workhorses of the industry, consistently garnering huge box office successes, even if critical acclaim fell short. As of tonight, March 4, 2018, the highest-grossing movie of all time is Avatar, a movie about human/alien interaction. Of the top ten highest-grossing movies in Box Office Mojo’s list, only two, Titanic and Furious 7, cannot be called either fantasy or science fiction. Yet none of the science fiction films, which earn the money to fuel the dream factory in Hollywood, was ever awarded the Best Picture Oscar. Hollywood is eager to rake in the money they bring in, but not so eager to recognize their worth with actual awards.
In short, good enough to profit from, but not good enough to brag about.
For those who are thinking, “But what about Lord of the Rings: Return of the King?”, I note that Lord of the Rings is a fantasy. Director Guillermo Del Toro calls The Shape of Water a “fable”, which in my opinion is deliberately misleading. Del Toro is as aware as any director that the label of “science fiction” carries, for the Academy, the whiff of lowbrow entertainment. I note that much of the media coverage of the Oscars calls the film a “fantasy”. But these are the expressions of ignorance. For most readers and fans, the distinction between fantasy and science fiction is clear. Fantasy involves magic; science fiction does not. There is no magic in The Shape of Water.
The Shape of Water is about an amphibious creature who resembles nothing so much as the Creature from the Black Lagoon crossed with Abe Sapien from Hellboy. (Which is no surprise at all, considering that Del Toro not only directed both Shape and Hellboy, and cast Doug Jones as the aquatic creature in each one.) Held prisoner in a secret government lab, he is befriended by a mute cleaning woman. Can you get any more classic SF than a monster in a secret lab, being experimented on? We’re right back at Frankenstein, the granddaddy SF movie of them all. No one is casting spells, no one is using magic: it’s science and scientists run amok, the basic DNA of science fiction since A Trip to the Moon debuted in 1902.
Nominated for a stunning 13 Oscars, The Shape of Water has won four, including Best Director. But the Best Director Oscar has already been awarded at least once to a genre film, in 2013 when Alfonso Cuaron won for Gravity. And of course SF and fantasy films have routinely walked away with the technical and special effects awards over the years.
No, the real news tonight is that, after being shut out of the top prize for almost a century, science fiction finally gets some respect.
And I can finally retire this article.