Guillermo del Toro has the opportunity to continue an unlikely streak of Mexican success at the Academy Awards on Sunday. If as expected the Guadalajara-born film-maker wins the best director Oscar for his fantasy drama The Shape of Water at this year s ceremony it will be the fourth time a Mexican has taken home the prize in the last five years after Alfonso Cuarón won in 2014 and Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2015 and 2016. The three directors close friends who are often referred to in the industry as the Three Amigos have transformed their nation s fortunes at the Academy Awards while proving major draws at the international box office. All three have proved as adept at managing grand Hollywood productions as they are at working on smaller homegrown films. Del Toro has directed big-budget blockbusters including Pacific Rim as well as Spanish-language magic-realist works such as Pan s Labyrinth. Cuarón masterminded the audacious deep-space thriller Gravity (for which he won the best director Oscar) and was handed the reins of a Harry Potter film but has also made more intimate Mexico-set dramas such as Y Tu Mamá También. Iñárritu who made his name with the savage dog-fighting drama Amores Perros has burnished a reputation for technically complex films starring Hollywood A-listers including Oscar best picture winner Birdman starring Michael Keaton and the Leonardo DiCaprio-fronted survival epic The Revenant both of which landed him best director Oscars. After Weinstein: why this year s Oscars are make or break Read more If the mainstream success of the Three Amigos seems a recent phenomenon it is one that has been built decades of work. As Del Toro says it has taken him more than 20 years to get to where he is now says Anna Marie de la Fuente a journalist who covers the Latin American film industry for Variety. Like many immigrants before them they have been embraced by Hollywood thanks to their prodigious raw talent perseverance hard work and in some measure luck. Crucial too has been the involvement of the Mexican film industry. A raft of initiatives in past decades have helped the likes of these film-makers and many before and after them so it can take some credit for their success says De la Fuente. It s not just the Amigos who have benefited: Emmanuel Lubezki a regular collaborator with Cuarón and Iñárritu is regarded as one of cinema s pre-eminent cinematographers and is the only person to have picked up three consecutive Academy Awards for cinematography. The Three Amigos have now largely left Mexican cinema behind for more universal English-language films though not entirely: later this year Cuarón will release Roma a 70s-set drama about a middle-class family in Mexico City. Still even if the trio are as much now the property of Hollywood as they are of their home country there s a decent chance of the next Del Toro Cuarón or Iñárritu emerging soon says De la Fuente. Mexico has been churning out more than a hundred films a year thanks to more tax incentives in particular one called Eficine which since 2006 gives incentives to private investors in film. So there are many opportunities for new talent to emerge. Topics Oscars 2018 Guillermo del Toro Alejandro González Iñárritu Alfonso Cuarón news Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Google Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content
Photo From left Alfonso Cuarón Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro G. Iñárritu at the Gotham Awards in 2006. Credit Stephen Lovekin/WireImage for the Independent Filmmaker Project via Getty Images MEXICO CITY In 1960s America a cleaning woman who can t speak and lives next door to a gay artist falls in love with a humanoid sea creature held in a government lab for Cold War experiments. It sounds like a pitch that would make Hollywood producers screw up their faces and scream Next! But the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro not only procured a 19.5 million budget for The Shape of Water but also made it into a commercial and critical success in the running for 13 prizes at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday.If Mr. del Toro wins the best director award at the Oscars it will be the fourth time a filmmaker from Mexico has taken the prize in five years all with unconventional films. Alejandro G. Iñárritu won in 2015 for Birdman the bizarrely hilarious tale of an aging superhero actor trying to get serious on Broadway and he did it again in 2016 with The Revenant a radically different western focused on a quest for revenge in subzero temperatures. Alfonso Cuarón triumphed in 2014 with Gravity a sci-fi story that many said was impossible to make before it made over 723 million at the worldwide box office.Referred to as The Three Amigos the title of a book about their transnational cinema these directors are not the only Mexican filmmakers who have won recent accolades in Hollywood. There is also the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki who has three Oscars; Rodrigo Prieto who shot The Wolf of Wall Street Argo and Brokeback Mountain ; and another Oscar winner the production designer Eugenio Caballero.The Amigos success shows the strength of an artistic circle; they are longtime friends who have encouraged one another to take risks. They began making their films when the Mexican industry was at a low in the 1980s dominated by raunchy movies about escort bars and overshadowed by telenovela soaps. The Amigos bucked the trend with dark stories about H.I.V. inner-city dogfights and historic horrors. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Their early Hollywood movies such as Mr. Cuarón s Little Princess (1995) and Mr. del Toro s Mimic (1997) had moderate success. In the 2000s their triumphs got steadily bigger as did their budgets; Gravity cost 100 million. Continue reading the main story
ALSO READ Guillermo del Toro to open a cinema named after him Guillermo Del Toro to head Venice film fest jury Guillermo Del Toro reveals why he is not directing Pacific Rim 2 Guillermo Del Toro wins Golden Globe for Best Director Alexandre Desplat praises Guillermo del Toro span.p-content div id = div-gpt line-height:0;font-size:0 Oscar-nominated director Guillermo del Toro is slated to open a new cinema named after him in Guadalajara his hometown on March 10. He will open the cinema at Guadalajara Fest reports variety.com. Hopefully he ll have a few Oscars in tow said Guadalajara Film Festival director Ivan Trujillo. The new cinema is one of several that the city is building to improve the festival s offer. Del Toro s acclaimed fable The Shape of Water has received 13 Oscar nominations including Best Director and Best Picture. The 90th Academy Awards ceremony will be held on March 4 here. It will be aired in India live on Star Movies and Star Movies Select on March 5. --IANS sug/nv/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Girl meets hot fish monster falls in love plots to break him out of a top-secret government research facility. On paper Guillermo del Toro s fantasy-sci-fi-romance-thriller The Shape of Water looks a bit Splash-meets-ET with the addition of an interspecies sex scene. (And you know Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard would never have gone there.) As Oscar bait this film is a tough sell. For starters it s the wrong genre. Academy voters rarely put a tick for best picture next to films featuring big beasties let alone a film with an orgasming big beastie. (The only fantasy film ever to win best picture was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; a sci-fi has yet to scoop the prize.) Del Toro s fish movie ought to be the Oscar race s rank outsider. Instead not only is it bookies second favourite for best picture (a fin or two behind Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri) it boasts 2018 s biggest haul of nominations with 13. Sally Hawkins should (but likely won t) win best actress for her role as Elisa Esposito a Baltimore cleaning lady who works the night shift in a bunker-like government lab in the early 1960s. Unable to speak (abused as a child her vocal cords were cut) Elisa uses sign language to communicate. The moment she claps eyes on her 7ft-tall lizardy beau in a murky tank she s smitten. (Not convinced? Wait till you see him; he s a shimmering beauty.) The last of his species Amphibian Man (to use his official name in the credits) was captured in the Amazon where the indigenous people worshipped him as a god. Now American scientists are experimenting on him like a lab rat. Prodder-in-chief is security boss Strickland (played by Michael Shannon in another one of his juicy Mr Nasty roles). To plot her daring rescue Elisa enlists her only two friends in the world: gay neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) and chatterbox work pal Zelda (Octavia Spencer) who asks the question we ve all been burning to about Amphibian Man s particulars. ( How? Does he have a ? ). Facebook Twitter Pinterest Even if you don t find the idea of fish sexy or like me have been on the fence about Del Toro in the past this is a movie that might well find its way into your heart. It s beautifully acted. Hawkins is dazzlingly good as Elisa. As critics have pointed out she plays the role like one of the all-time silent-film heroines. And at a time when everyone is banging on about strong female characters her performance says something nuanced about strength: Elisa s vulnerability isn t a sign of weakness. There is inner steel in openness allowing the world to see who she really is at her core without putting up a tough wall of cynicism or world-weariness. Kudos too to Del Toro regular Doug Jones who plays Amphibian Man (it took four people and tubs of lube to squeeze him into his latex suit every morning). For better or worse this is a film that only Del Toro could make. He s always had a thing for monsters. (In Mexico as a child his Catholic grandmother tried to exorcise him twice.) And after bigger budget pictures like Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak The Shape of Water is a return to more artisanal meaningful film-making cue a swooning woman-and-fish song and dance routine straight out of the golden age of Hollywood. So will the Academy bite? Perhaps Three Billboards more meets the mood http://www.good-tutorials.com/users/kkmobik right now for something more raw and real. Personally I d argue that Del Toro s film though set in 1962 is as timely and relevant in its portrayal of an invisible woman taking matters into her own hands. (Elisa is repeatedly ignored and dismissed as a lowly piss-wiper .) And unlike the heroines in the monster movies Del Toro grew up watching she doesn t need to be rescued from the clutches of a monster; she is doing the rescuing. Some I know have found The Shape of Water s heart-on-sleeve sincerity a bit dippily naive or indulgent. But its message of kindness and acceptance left a lump in my throat and ought to leave some statuettes on Guillermo del Toro s mantelpiece too. This article was amended on 1 March 2018 because The Shape of Water is set in 1962 not 1963 as an earlier version said. Topics Oscars 2018 Best picture Oscar hustings The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro Sally Hawkins Romance blogposts Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Google Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content
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