This year's 90th Oscar Academy Awards was a four man race for best picture. With Get Out and Lady Bird being the potential unconventional wins and The Shape Of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri being the more conventional choice, with Guillmero Del Toro's fantasy The Shape of Water winning which very roughly details the tale of a a person with a disability, a black woman and a gay man working together to defeat an authoritarian figure to save a sea creature which without actually seeing the film sounds like a mess but has been described to be a touching masterpiece.
Although Get Out was pegged to win the award by those who watched and were fans of it the academy ultimately decided to award Jordan Peele with a Best Screenwriter award which was enough for him but socially as a whole I believe that it has opened a metaphorical door for non-white actors to be considered for leads in feature length films removing the notion that it wont sell at box office which is nonsense as it grossed 255 million domestically.
The Coen brother's three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was also pegged as potential winner for the category. Ultimately it's lead actress Frances McDormand (Fargo) won the award for Best Actress due to her performance and is one of the very few people in the world to receive a Triple Crown of Acting. During her acceptance speech she detailed the issues still racing the film industry and it's levels of representation. She ended the speech with the note of an 'inclusion rider' which is the suggestion that A-list actors can request that"tertiary speaking characters should match the gender distribution of the setting for the film, as long as it's sensible for the plot," To help improve the gender inequality within films.
Greta Gerwig's directorial debut Lady Bird was perhaps the biggest Oscar snub of the night, taking home no awards at all despite being a particularly excellent film. Both written and directed by a female and led by one on screen Lady Bird is a coming of age story that depicts the frustrations of youth and the problems every teenager must struggle through as they enter adulthood. It also flips film conventions by using the male characters as storytelling devices for the female ones. If hollywood had truly intended to help change the opinion on how women are viewed within film, they would have surely chosen it to win an award of some form.
This year's nominees ands lineup was anything but the typical Oscar lineup, it shows that Hollywood although moving at a rather slow rate is willing to start to change and open up it's doors to different and better ways of making film.
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