Oscars 2018: The Shape Of Water - A Round Of Applause For A Win Well Deserved

I move my mouth, like him. I make no sound, like him. What does that make me?

It is an interesting parallel that Elisa (Sally Hawkins) draws in the movie The Shape of Water with an amphibian creature erstwhile "worshiped by the Amazonians as a God" but captured by a secret US Government laboratory during the Cold War in 1962.

You see, the ones we relate the most are the ones we get drawn to the most. And for a mute girl who communicates in sign language and feels, well, unheard...it is with a foreign body, a fish-like creature caught in the human world that she finds her heart drawn to. And that right there is not just a story of love that crosses human boundaries (literally) but also a story of fighting the concept of "otherness" that as humans we are guilty of constructing.

And that has to be a reason why the movie took home four Oscars on Sunday, out of the 13 nominations - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score.

Guillermo del Toro's movie is almost a fairy tale, really. And that is what Giles (Richard Jenkins) as a narrator ventures: tale of love and loss, of a princess with no voice, and a monster who tried to destroy it all. In this love story unlike any other, Elisa is romantically (and later sexually) drawn towards a creature, a "scientific asset", fearlessly and inexplicably. In him, she finds understanding and love, he (in her words) "doesn't see what is incomplete in me, he doesn't know what I lack". And like every fairy take there is a monster trying to keep the princess away from her prince. And here is Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) a United States Colonel in charge of studying the "asset". As a racist, misogynistic, a sexual predator, he is everything that will rile you up; making you demand for poetic justice in the end. He revels in power and to tread on people he thinks are beneath him. And therein lays him being an antithesis to everything this movie stands for.

It is a tale wrought with fantasy and drama, it is a story of not just love that people find in partners (in this case a "fish"), but also of friends who are more family than anything - without judgement, and with boundless love.

But it is also a story of a band of "outsiders", come together to stitch together their own narrative; brought together by the reason the society separates them; they are the people with no voices. And not only do they find their voice with each other but also become it. And probably that is why Elisa, Giles, and Zelda (Octavia Spencer)...and in a way Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) find in them the ability to relate to a creature in captivity.

It is really unsurprising that The Shape Of Water won the Oscar for Best Picture. In an award ceremony that is celebrated inclusion, diversity and breaking boundaries with every passing year, to celebrate a movie that is all of that and then some more is quite predictable.

There are chances you haven't watched the film, and therefore it will be unfair to say anything more about it. But we do recommend you that the two hours away from your life and devote it to Elisa and her story of love, and how it takes the shape of water after all - the shape of whatever it meets.

And I should leave you with the verse that the film ends with, for it to strum the strings of your heart.

"Unable to perceive the shape of you, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love, it humbles my heart, for you are everywhere..."