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ACADEMY AWARDS

On March 4, the Academy Awards will honour the best in cinema and bring together a film industry still shaken by the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo. Here's a primer


Table of contentsHighlightsFull listMap to the starsThe Weinstein factor

THE HIGHLIGHTS

  • Most nominations: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water led the pack with 13 nominations.
  • Notable firsts: Rachel Morrison made history as the first woman nominated in the cinematography category for the film Mudbound.
  • The Globe’s take: Of the 10 best-picture nominees, the ones with the best Globe and Mail reviews were Lady Bird and Dunkirk, which got four stars. Three films – Call Me By Your Name, Phantom Thread and Darkest Hour tied for worst-reviewed, though with two-and-a-half stars each, they were hardly stinkers. The worst-reviewed film to get any nomination was The Greatest Showman (for best original song), which John Semley gave zero stars.
  • Canadian connections: The Shape of Water was filmed in the Toronto and Hamilton areas, and Canadian producer J. Miles Dale shared in the best picture nomination. Other Canadians nominated included actor Christopher Plummer, production designer Paul Austerberry, costume designer Luis M. Sequeira and film editor Sidney Wolinsky. One of the nominees for best animated film, The Breadwinner, is a Canadian co-production based on a novel by Canadian author Deborah Ellis.


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THE FULL LIST

Best picture


Best director

  • Christopher Nolan, Dunkirk
  • Jordan Peele, Get Out (Read review)
  • Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird
  • Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread
  • Guillermo del Toro, The Shape of Water

Jordan Peele is the director of Get Out.

Guillermo del Toro.

Director Greta Gerwig, right, and Saoirse Ronan on the set of Lady Bird.


Best actress

  • Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
  • Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Margot Robbie, I, Tonya (Read review)
  • Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
  • Meryl Streep, The Post

Meryl Streep plays Kay Graham in The Post.

Sally Hawkins, left, and Doug Jones in a scene from the film The Shape of Water.” The Cold War-era merman movie was shot in Hamilton and Toronto.


Best supporting actress

  • Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
  • Allison Janney, I, Tonya
  • Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
  • Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
  • Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

Mary J. Blige in a scene from Mudbound.

Octavia Spencer in The Shape of Water.


Best actor

  • Timothée Chalamet, Call Me By Your Name
  • Daniel Day Lewis, Phantom Thread
  • Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
  • Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
  • Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel Esq. (Read review)

Daniel Kaluuya stars in the Jordan Peele film Get Out.

Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver in Call Me By Your Name.


Best supporting actor

  • Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project (Read review)
  • Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
  • Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
  • Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World (Read review)
  • Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Christopher Plummer is J. Paul Getty in the film All the Money in the World.

Actor Sam Rockwell at the Toronto International Film Festival.


Best original screenplay

  • The Big Sick (Read review)
  • Get Out
  • Lady Bird
  • The Shape of Water
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan in The Big Sick.


Best adapted screenplay


Best animated film (feature)

Miguel, voiced by Anthony Gonzalez, right, looks to Hector, voiced by Gael Garcia Bernal, to find the secret behind his family’s ban on music in Coco.


Best animated film (short)

  • Dear Basketball
  • Garden Party
  • Lou
  • Negative Space
  • Revolting Rhymes

Best short film (live action)

  • DeKalb Elementary
  • The Eleven O’Clock
  • My Nephew Emmett
  • The Silent Child
  • Watu Wote/All of Us

Documentary (feature)

  • Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
  • Faces Places
  • Icarus
  • Last Men in Aleppo
  • Strong Island

Documentary (short)

  • Edith + Eddie
  • Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405
  • Heroin(e)
  • Knife Skills
  • Traffic Stop

Best foreign-language film

  • A Fantastic Woman (Chile)
  • The Insult (Lebanon)
  • Loveless (Russia)
  • On Body and Soul (Hungary)
  • The Square (Sweden)

Cinematography

  • Blade Runner 2049 (Read review)
  • Darkest Hour
  • Dunkirk
  • Mudbound
  • The Shape of Water

Dunkirk is a film capturing the evacuation of Allied troops from a European beach in the Second World War.


Costume design


Film editing

  • Baby Driver (Read review)
  • Dunkirk
  • I, Tonya
  • The Shape of Water
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Makeup and hairstyling

Gary Oldman stars as Winston Churchill in the film Darkest Hour.


Production design

  • Beauty and the Beast
  • Blade Runner 2049
  • Darkest Hour
  • Dunkirk
  • The Shape of Water

Music (original score)

  • Hans Zimmer, Dunkirk
  • Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread
  • Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water
  • John Williams, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Read review)
  • Carter Burwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Music (original song)

  • Mighty River, Mudbound
  • Mystery of Love, Call Me By Your Name
  • Remember Me, Coco
  • Stand Up for Something, Marshall
  • This is Me, The Greatest Showman (Read review)

Sound editing

  • Baby Driver
  • Blade Runner 2049
  • Dunkirk
  • The Shape of Water
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Sound mixing

  • Baby Driver
  • Blade Runner 2049
  • Dunkirk
  • The Shape of Water
  • Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Visual effects

Blade Runner 2049 is directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve.

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MORE READING

Read more from The Globe and Mail's conversations and profiles of the filmmakers and performers nominated for Academy Awards this year.

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THE BACKSTORY


This year's Oscar night will be the first after the downfall of one of the academy's biggest players, producer Harvey Weinstein. He practically invented the modern Oscar-campaign strategy, and his companies, Miramax and later The Weinstein Company, made dozens of award-winning films. But last fall, The New York Times reported that Mr. Weinstein used his Hollywood clout to sexually exploit actresses and employees for decades. More media reports alleged that he had raped or harassed dozens of women, paying or threatening them to ensure their silence and using private detectives to hamper media inquiries about his alleged misdeeds.

Days after the news broke, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revoked the lifetime membership of Mr. Weinstein, who by then had been fired from his company and would soon face criminal investigations in New York, Los Angeles and London. You won't be seeing him at awards shows any time soon, but the disgraced mogul's presence will still be keenly felt because of the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns, which have inspired women to speak out against other alleged abusers in film, TV, news media and other industries. Solidarity with sexual-assault survivors was a major theme of January's Golden Globes, where actresses wore black in a symbolic gesture, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which had a roster of almost all female presenters.

The list of Oscar nominees has been marked in noticeable ways by the controversy that has divided Hollywood. Christopher Plummer got his role in All the Money in the World after director Ridley Scott excised Kevin Spacey from the film, reshooting his scenes with Mr. Plummer in the role of J. Paul Getty instead. James Franco, also accused of sexual misconduct, didn't make the cut for best actor for The Disaster Artist, which did get nominated for best adapted screenplay.

Here is some more reading on the after-effects of #MeToo and how the film industry is trying to learn from it.

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