In Praise of the Weird and Actually Pretty Underrated Film That Will Definitely Win at Least One Oscar This Year

I knew The Shape of Water had come to occupy a weird place in the pre-Oscar culture when WeSmirch recently informed me that the man/fish/possible Amazonian deity whom Sally Hawkins falls in love with in the fantastical film had inspired a “ruffled, gill-like” dildo. And—surprise!—it wasn’t even the only Shape of Water–inspired sex toy for sale on Etsy. And that the former phallus actually elicited a response from Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro himself, who noted that, while we’re going there, it wasn’t “an accurate representation” of Amphibian Man’s (his stated IMDB name’s) penis as he imagines it—because, evidently, he too has imagined it.

It was easy to forget in all of this that everyone was talking not about an obscure RedTube category but a 13-time Oscar nominee, as Doug Jones, the real actor beneath the scaly, shimmery fish makeup, seemed to suggest when asked by The Wrap about the emergent Shape of Water dildo market.

“The last thing I want to be remembered for is a silicone appendage that comes in two sizes,” he said.

And, yet, this is the plight of The Shape of Water, a grand, gorgeous cinematic fable and “visual feast” (to borrow the classic reviewers’ cliché) that has nevertheless become the weird, woefully underrated joke of awards season. While The Shape of Water has on-paper cred, with Golden Globes, BAFTA, and SAG nominations and the aforementioned Oscar love, it seldom actually wins the big, splashy awards, apart from directing honors for Del Toro, a Critics’ Choice statue for Hawkins, and various honors for Alexandre Desplat’s entrancing score. Its brand is, basically, “that movie where Hawkins fucks a fish,” as The Daily Beast’s Ira Madison III has hilariously quipped on his Keep It! podcast. I saw it that way myself for a while—but because my mom really wanted to see Sally Hawkins fuck that fish, I acquiesced and joined her one rainy February afternoon, and, to my surprise, was converted.

It was on that very day that I learned that Hawkins, as the mute cleaning lady Elisa Esposito, conveys an entire love story with her facial expressions, saying it all without saying a word. And that Richard Jenkins, Elisa’s gay friend Giles, is heart-tugging and rueful and tender in that perfect Richard Jenkins-y way. And, most of all, that the story—and its transportive, under-the-sea production value—bends your mind and forces you to temporarily subscribe to twisty fairy tales, tells you to get over yourself and your basic, La La Land notions of romance, coaxes you to suspend belief and play along. Maybe there’s something lovely about falling in love with a man/fish/Amazonian deity because you’re both outsiders! And maybe it’s just dandy to forsake all convention and sleep with him in your bathtub too. There are plenty of shortcomings, including Michael Shannon—yet again—playing a one-dimensional Lucifer (seriously, someone cast him in a frothy rom-com and let him stretch a little!) and saddling the ever-wonderful Octavia Spencer with what felt like an archetypal sassy black sidekick role. But in the end, the glorious, all-consuming weirdness of The Shape of Water prevails.

So why isn’t anybody really talking about it? Not just at the Oscars luncheon, but at brunch and dinner and, of course, on Twitter? In spite of its high notes, The Shape of Water has seemed to fail to break through and reach the wider pop culture conversation like the best Oscar movies tend to do. And that may be because—fish phallus microtrend aside —The Shape of Water is just not that Internet-y—or, at least, not as Internet-y as its Oscar competition. There are no exquisite resting bitch faces, à la Cyril from Phantom Thread. There are no dancing Armie Hammers. And, let’s be real, there’s not much time left in the day to extoll Hawkins’s greatness, because Instagram-stalking Timothée Chalamet is practically a full-time job. Great movies don’t have to spark memes, but frankly, it’s one way that they seep into the national conversation and become part of our daily lives, if even only for a season.

In contrast with the rest of the 2018 nominees, The Shape of Water—an epic-feeling period piece with a healthy splash of “Hooray for Hollywood”–style navel-gazing—is a little bit out of time. It didn’t ostensibly create an entirely new cinematic genre like Get Out. It didn’t become a political flashpoint like Three Billboards Over Ebbing, Missouri, which is shaping up to be this year’s Best Picture favorite despite the backlash against its treatment of race and violence. The Shape of Water is a bit like the film equivalent of Jenkins’s Giles, who, struggling to find his place in society, says that he was born either too early or too late for his life. Maybe The Shape of Water will stand the test of time, go on to Netflix classicism, find a loving audience, and get its true due later on (hey, if it worked for The Room?). And maybe that’s not such a bad thing: Oscar adoration is fleeting and doesn’t always age well. Better to become an underrated work of art than to be the next Crash.