The Shape of Water's Oscars win is the triumph of a real artist and immersive cinema | Peter Bradshaw

Guillermo del Toro has created a richly sensual and dreamlike film that, in the end, seduced the Academy without being too threatening

Related: Oscars winners 2018: the full list

At the end of a somewhat predictable evening, we were all longing for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to work their anarchic magic, and start handing out the awards to the films that weren’t in the envelope. Perhaps for the sheer devilment, they could have given something to, say, Kathryn Bigelow’s powerful race drama Detroit, a highly plausible Oscar-worthy film, which the Academy hivemind mysteriously decided was worth precisely zilch and became utterly forgotten about. In the end, many deserving films got what they deserved, others didn’t, the internal economy of awards season dictating, as it so often does, that the rich become richer. And it was hardly obvious that this was the year of radical change in Hollywood’s sexual politics. As my colleague Benjamin Lee notes in his blog this year’s Academy Awards in fact garnered the fewest amount of female winners for six years.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2tkW5WG