Guillermo del Toro wins Best Director Oscar for The Shape of Water

Sunday night at the 90th annual Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro took home the award for achievement in directing for The Shape of Water. It was the third award of the evening for the film, which also took home statues for Original Score and Production Design. The film went into the evening with 13 nominations overall.

The Mexico-born filmmaker followed the lead of many other winners, immediately pivoting to issues of diversity and inclusion. “I am an immigrant,” he said, name-checking Salma Hayek, Gael García Bernal, and several other Mexican artists who were present in the room. “And in the last 25 years, I’ve been living in a country all of our own. Part of it is here, part of it is in Europe, part of it is everywhere. Because I think the greatest thing that art does, and that our industry does, is erase the lines in the sand when the world tells us to make them deeper.”

It was a particularly appropriate sentiment for The Shape of Water, a film that focuses on the fear and alienation some can feel when faced with people and things they may not understand. In del Toro’s film, it’s personified by the remarkable hate — and improbable love — that a merman encounters when he’s pulled into a Baltimore lab to be studied.

The celebrated filmmaker had previously been nominated for his 2007 film Pan’s Labyrinth. This year’s crop of nominees for Best Director included several other similarly heralded Hollywood favorites, as well as a pair of disruptive upstarts. Christopher Nolan was nominated for his work on Dunkirk, while Paul Thomas Anderson received a nomination for his period drama Phantom Thread.

But the two first-time feature directors that presented some of the most intense speculation ahead of the evening. Greta Gerwig was nominated for her work on Lady Bird, making her only the fifth woman in Oscar history to receive a Best Director nomination, while first-time director Jordan Peele, known for his work on the racially frank Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele, was also nominated for his subversive horror-comedy Get Out. Peele won the Oscar for original screenplay for Get Out earlier in the evening.

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