Oscars 2018: winners, nominations, and biggest moments from the 90th Academy Awards

The new Oscar awarding achievements in popular film is a bad idea.

Yes, I’m aware I’m saying that knowing essentially nothing about how the award will be defined and adjudicated; the press release from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announcing the new category states that those details “will be forthcoming.”

The Shape of Water was the most-nominated film at the Oscars on Sunday night, and it won in four categories: Production Design, Original Score, Director, and the all-important Best Picture.

A fantastical, watery romance between a mute woman and a fish-man, The Shape of Water is directed by Guillermo del Toro, a beloved director of movies in many genres — horror (The Devil’s Backbone), gothic romance (Crimson Peak), action/sci-fi (Pacific Rim), comics (Hellboy), and fantasy (Pan’s Labyrinth).

Short films usually fly under the average moviegoer’s radar, during awards season and the rest of the year alike. But every year, the Academy Awards offers a reminder of short films’ ability to showcase a stunning variety of filmmaking techniques and themes — and their runtime doesn’t take away from their power.

The Oscars honor three short films each year: one animated, one live action, and one documentary. Here’s a guide to this year’s winners and how to watch them.

No one film dominated the 2018 Oscars ceremony. The Shape of Water was the big winner with four awards (including Best Picture), and most films won only one or two.

For movie lovers, that’s great news: It means the ceremony served up a diverse list of films to watch, if you’d like to catch up with the year in cinema. Here’s how to watch all of the Oscar-winning films — most of which you can fire up and enjoy at home tonight.

The 2018 Oscars are done with, consigned to the history books for the rest of time. And a ton of great people won their first awards there, from Guillermo Del Toro to Jordan Peele, from 89-year-old James Ivory (the oldest winner ever) to Allison Janney.

But there’s one thing the 2018 Oscars lacked: ratings. They were the least-watched Oscars ever, with just 26.5 million viewers. Yes, that beat out the other awards shows (like the Golden Globes and Grammys) this year, but it’s also over 5 million lower than the previous low (32 million in 2008) and 20 percent lower viewership than the Oscars saw in 2017.

Between #MeToo, Hollywood’s ongoing attempts to curtail harassment and abuse within its ranks, and that whole thing where last year’s Best Picture was accidentally awarded to La La Land instead of Moonlight, Jimmy Kimmel had a laundry list of intimidating things he was expected to address during his second year in a row of hosting the Oscars. But in a monologue free of many bells and whistles — like, not even a single spontaneous burst into song — Kimmel managed to set ‘em up and knock ‘em down.

After kicking off with a self-aware warning that announced winners maybe shouldn’t “get up right away” to accept their award, just in case of another mix-up, Kimmel took a pointed turn into the uglier side of Hollywood that the Harvey Weinstein allegations brought to light.

“And now I’d like to get some perspective,” Frances McDormand said, setting her newly minted Oscar for Best Actress on the floor, “because I’ve got some things to say.”

After a night that somehow managed to both acknowledge and skirt the big issues of the day — like #MeToo and Hollywood’s ongoing attempts to diversify its ranks — McDormand stared out at the rapt Academy Awards audience and decided she was going to be a little more direct.

Watching the producers of this year’s Oscars try to navigate the Best Actor category in the year of #MeToo has been like watching the most nail-biting event in the Winter Olympics. It’s as though they’re skiing backwards down a sheer mountainside littered with men who have been accused of doing terrible things to women, and every time they come across another one the producers have to do a triple backflip over him.

It’s precarious work — and that’s because Hollywood really is positively littered with men who have been accused of doing terrible things to women, and who until very recently have suffered few consequences for it. As a result, it seems to be almost impossible to host a major Hollywood event filled with A-listers and not inadvertently include an alleged predator.

The official line on the Oscars this year is that it would be about movies, not politics, and that unlike January’s fiery Golden Globes, it wouldn’t spend too much time on the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements. Instead, the ceremony confined most of its acknowledgment of TIme’s Up to a single montage that amounted to a decorous, polite missed opportunity.

The montage featured movie clips with uplifting images of women, people of color, and gay and transgender people, interspersed with interviews from filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, and Kumail Nanjiani, all enthusiastically discussing the importance of representation in the movies. Jenkins talked of how powerful it was to see women crying in the theaters during Wonder Woman as they finally got to experience the empowerment white men get to feel at every other superhero movie; Nanjiani advised straight white men that they could empathize with movie stars who didn’t look like them. “It’s not that hard,” he said. “I’ve done it my whole life.”

The Oscars red carpet is one of the most important events of the year when it comes to celebrity image-making. It’s a night when Hollywood’s biggest celebrities know the world is watching them, and so they take the opportunity to tell us who they are and who they want to be. Not through their interviews, necessarily, which tend to be pretty pat, but through their clothes.

It’s a high-pressure night, so the outfits are usually pretty staid from a fashion point of view: There are a lot of pretty, bland gowns and blank, unremarkable suits. But from an image-making point of view, it gets pretty fascinating: Any major celebrity worth their Oscar ticket uses the red carpet to tell us exactly how they want us to think about them. So here are the most interesting image-building moments on this year’s red carpet.

On Sunday night at the 2018 Oscars, the big winner was a love story involving a fish-man, which beat out a revenge comedy centered on the death of a teen girl and a horror flick featuring body-snatching Caucasian people.

Heading into the night, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water led the field with 13 nominations, and it ended up winning four Oscars, including major categories Best Picture and Directing, as well as Production Design and Original Score.

The 2018 Oscars — the 90th ever presented — were a little all over the place.

The Best Picture winner (The Shape of Water) won only four awards (Picture, Directing, Original Score, and Production Design) but still won the most awards of any film. The runner-up was Dunkirk with three (Editing, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing). And then a handful of films (Blade Runner 2049, Coco, Darkest Hour, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) won two awards apiece.

“These are the 90th Academy Awards,” Jimmy Kimmel said in his monologue opening the Oscars on Sunday night. “This is history happening right here.”

But for many in attendance, and many watching, the most history-making aspect of the show wasn’t its 90th birthday — it was the fact that this was the first Academy Awards since the New York Times exposé on producer Harvey Weinstein, the first since Time’s Up, the first since #MeToo became a household name across America.

The 2018 Oscars had delightful moments, predictable wins, notable firsts, and major upsets (though none as major as last year’s). But perhaps most notably, it had suspense. After several years of adding more women and people of color to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ membership in response to criticism about its lack of diversity, this year’s crop of nominees, while lacking a clear frontrunner, were full of accolades for women and minorities; they also represented a host of new milestones and “firsts” that indicated the Academy’s efforts to diversify were paying off in interesting ways.

How many of these nominations would result in Oscar gold was anyone’s guess going into the ceremony. But as the dust settles on the 2018 Oscars, the jumble of nominations and wins and records indicates an Academy in flux — and some truly unexpected milestones.

From 2014 to 2016, the three Oscars for Best Directing were won by two members of a trio of Mexican filmmakers, who rose up through the ranks of first the Mexican film industry and then the American film industry together, who supported and befriended each other, as each rose onto Hollywood’s A-list in very different ways.

The 2014 award went to Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity, while Alejandro G. Iñárritu won in 2015 for Birdman and in 2016 for The Revenant. But the third member of their trio, Guillermo del Toro, seemed unlikely ever to win an Oscar. His movies, steeped in horror and dark fantasy as they were, weren’t the sorts of things that typically catch Oscar’s fancy.

In less than three minutes on the Oscars stage, rapper Common and singer Andra Day recapped the last year of political controversy and called for an increase in public activism.

The musicians were performing “Stand Up for Something” from Marshall, the film about the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. The song was nominated for Best Original Song at this year’s ceremony.

Hollywood can seem like a place that prizes youth, but tonight the Academy celebrated a number of its oldest members with awards, nominations, and spots of honor in the ceremony.

The big win of the night went to the 89-year-old James Ivory, who won the Best Adapted Screenplay award for his work on Call Me by Your Name, which he adapted from André Aciman’s 2007 novel.

“I know something of a woman in a man’s profession.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid — that pisses me off.”

Hollywood’s most prestigious awards show for movies and the people who make them has arrived. The 2018 Oscars will take place Sunday, March 4, 2018. Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, the Motion Picture Academy’s 90th annual awards ceremony will be the pinnacle and culmination of the awards season.

Part of what makes this year’s Oscar race so intriguing is its open-endedness — there’s no clear frontrunner for Best Picture among the nine nominees, which span an unusually wide field of films and performances.

Hollywood’s red carpets have been the stuff of highly glamorized lore for decades. They are where stars — big and small and everyone in between — go to put on their most immaculate face and promote their current projects, show off their style, and, most importantly, make an impression on all who may be watching. To much of the general population, red carpets are where the magic of Hollywood goes to shine, and no event has more pressure to be its sparkling best than the Oscars.

Still: for as casual and effortless as red carpets often seem to be, they’re anything but. Each one has an entire ecosystem of painstaking work behind it, with celebrities, film studios, stylists, publicists, and designers all collaborating — but also jockeying to control — the images they’re trying to sell.

The Oscars are upon us once again, with last year’s host, Jimmy Kimmel, returning to emcee the 90th annual Academy Awards ceremony, airing Sunday, March 4, at 8 pm EST on ABC.

The Oscars will conclude an awards season where the only certainty is uncertainty in the race for the film industry’s biggest prize. This year there’s no clear frontrunner for Best Picture, as The Shape of Water, Dunkirk, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri have all taken home hardware at other recent awards ceremonies, while there are whispers that Get Out might pull off an upset.

Method acting describes a broad framework for training actors to break down, understand, and portray their characters. The acting technique emphasizes tapping into one’s personal experiences to reproduce the emotions, actions, and behavior required for a dramatic performance.

But this approach remains controversial, because of the mental and emotional stress it can create in actors, and because of the extreme lengths some actors go to achieve it.

The Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars might as well be called “The Pixar Award.” The category has been in existence for just 17 years, since the 2002 Oscars ceremony (rewarding the films of 2001), when Shrek — yes, Shrek — won. At eight of those ceremonies, Pixar won the big prize, including winning four years in a row from 2008 to 2011 (for Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3).

What’s more, Pixar is the odds-on favorite to win this year, for its marvelously sweet and affecting Coco, which has received some of the strongest reviews for a Pixar movie made this decade (when the venerable computer animation studio has had its struggles and made far too many Cars sequels).

More than in any other year, predicting the film that will win Best Picture at the 2018 Oscars feels like a rigged game. After La La Land — the sort-of frontrunner that hit every mark it seemingly needed to hit to clinch the title — lost in memorable fashion to Moonlight at the 2017 ceremony, those of us who like to predict these sorts of things are more skittish than ever.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, but three rise to the top. The first is that the Moonlight upset has left people wondering if every year might feature such a significant upset. Something similar happened in 2007, when it seemed like The Departed was the favorite for Best Picture, but Crash’s upset win over Brokeback Mountain the year before led to lots of exotic theorizing on how, say, Little Miss Sunshine would pull out the win. (The Departed ultimately won, in a low-drama ceremony.)

Each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominates between five and 10 movies to compete for Best Picture trophy at the Oscars — its most prestigious award, and the one given out at the very end of the night. What “best picture” really means is a little fuzzy, but the most accurate way of characterizing it might be that it indicates how Hollywood wants to remember the past year in film.

The Best Picture winner, in other words, is the movie that represents the film industry in America, what it’s capable of, and how it sees itself at a specific point in time.