March 6, 2018

The 90^th Academy Awards, held on March 4, 2018, proved to be a celebration of diversity. Ending an awards season that showcased the “Time’s Up” and “#MeToo” movements spurred by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct in Hollywood, the show spotlighted the contributions by women, minorities, and immigrants to the motion-picture industry.

Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out (2017).
Credit: © Universal Pictures

The diversity of nominees from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences proved better than years past. The 2017 Oscars made history with a record number of nominations and wins for African Americans. Among the nominees was director Jordan Peele, who became the first African American to be awarded an Oscar for Original Screenplay with his horror film, Get Out.

Last year’s Oscars might be best known for the blunder by presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in announcing the wrong winner for the Oscar for best picture. This year the pair from Bonnie and Clyde gave it another attempt—and got it right. The winner was director Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water. The Best Picture Oscar was the fourth of the night for the science fiction film. Del Toro also won the Oscar for Best Director, making him the fourth Mexican director in five years to earn that honor.

Doug Jones, and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water (2017).
Credit: © Fox Searchlight Pictures

Another record-breaker came from the Best Animated Feature winner, Coco. Songwriter Robert Lopez earned Coco a second award for Best Original Song, “Remember Me.” This Oscar made Lopez the first person to ever achieve a double EGOT (when a person wins an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony — the ‘double’ meaning Lopez did it twice.) Kobe Bryant, a former star of the National Basketball Association (NBA), surprised everyone with an Oscar win for his and Glen Keane’s animated short, Dear Basketball.

Late night TV personality Jimmy Kimmel hosted. Among other jokes, Kimmel said the person with the shortest acceptance speech would win a free Jet Ski. Cut to later, Mark Bridges got to ride the Jet Ski that turned out to be very real. Bridges’ 36-second speech was for Best Costume Design, Phantom Thread. Kimmel also thanked the moviegoers that make filmmaking worth it. In one of the show’s highlights, he took some stars to a nearby theater screening Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. Emily Blunt, Ansel Elgort, Gal Gadot, Mark Hamill, Lin Manuel-Miranda, and other stars passed out snacks to surprise the audience, even shooting hot dog cannons at them.

Academy Award Winners in 2018:

Best Picture: The Shape of Water
Best Actress: Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best Actor: Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
Best Supporting Actress: Allison Janney, I, Tonya
Best Supporting Actor: Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Best Director: Guillermo Del Toro, The Shape of Water
Best Original Screenplay: Jordan Peele, Get Out
Best Adapted Screenplay: James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name
Best Animated Feature: Coco
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049
Best Film Editing: Lee Smith, Dunkirk
Best Original Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Shape of Water
Best Original Song: “Remember Me,” Coco
Best Foreign-Language Film: A Fantastic Woman (Chile)
Best Production Design: Paul D. Austerberry, Jeffrey A. Melvin, and Shane Vieau, The Shape of Water
Best Costume Design: Mark Bridges, Phantom Thread
Best Sound Mixing: Mark Weingarten, Gregg Landaker, and Gary A. Rizzo, Dunkirk
Best Sound Editing: Alex Gibson and Richard King, Dunkirk
Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Kazuhiro Tsuji, David Malinowski, Lucy Sibbick, Darkest Hour
Best Visual Effects: John Nelson, Paul Lambert, Richard R. Hoover, and Gerd Nefzer, Blade Runner 2049
Best Animated Short Film: Dear Basketball
Best Live-Action Short Film: The Silent Child
Best Feature Documentary: Icarus
Best Short-Subject Documentary: Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405

January 18, 2018

In October 2017, claims of sexual harassment and misconduct among certain Hollywood personalities led to the explosion of a global social media movement known as Me Too. Also known by its internet hashtag #MeToo, the movement is a forum for victims of sexual assault to tell their personal experiences. The recent Me Too movement joined a similar movement of the same name that began years earlier. The vast numbers associated with #MeToo—the hashtag has been used millions of times on social media—have revealed the widespread problem of sexual harassment around the world. Through Me Too, millions of women—and men—have come forward to help ease the pain and guilt often felt by victims of sexual assault.

The Me Too movement began in 2006 and exploded on the social media scene in 2017. Credit: © Mihai Surdu, Shutterstock

Me Too was originally begun in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana Burke to organize women of color against sexual abuse. Burke was inspired to use the phrase after being unable to respond to a young girl who confided to her that she had been sexually assaulted. Burke later wished she had simply told the girl, “me too.” Burke worked quietly on the issue for years, and is now senior director for Brooklyn’s Girls for Gender Equity (GGE), a nonprofit organization committed to the physical, psychological, social, and economic development of girls and women.

In 2017, as news broke of widespread sexual abuse in Hollywood, actress Alyssa Milano (unaware of Burke’s existing movement) wrote on Twitter, “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” The combined Me Too forces created a worldwide forum for victims of sexual abuse. Numerous Hollywood celebrities have been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior through Me Too, as have many people in government, the media and music industries, and other highly visible occupations.

Time magazine named the “silence breakers” of the #MeToo movement as the magazine’s collective Person of the Year for 2017. Sexual assault victims who speak out are silence breakers because many people keep quiet about the experience which caused them psychological and perhaps physical harm. The negative consequences of speaking out can be daunting, and often the perpetrators of sexual assault go unpunished.

Beyond the Me Too movement, sexual abuse scandals in churches, schools, and athletic organizations have emerged in numerous places, most recently in Australia, Chile, India, and the United States. The World Health Organization estimates that one in three women in the world has experienced sexual violence.