You can always expect smear campaigns to arise every Oscar season, after all, the nasty feuding for awards love is nothing new in Hollywood. “Saving Private Ryan” dealt with it in 1998 when it was accused of erasing British presence in the opening D-Day combat, there was the complete scrub of homosexuality in “A Beautiful Mind,” “Slumdog Millionaire” severely underpaying its Indian child actors, “Zero Dark Thirty,” supposedly, promoting torture and how can we forget last year’s “La La Land,” which was accused of not being an authentic enough portrayal of Jazz and for being “too white.” If you’re the awards season front-runner, you can expect some extra heat.
With all that being said, this year is surely no exception. Not many big studio films have had to deal with the number of accusations Guillermo del Toro‘s “The Shape of Water” has had these last few months. It all started when concerns were raised that Marc S. Nollkaemper’s 13-minute short “The Space Between Us,” had some uncanny resemblances to del Toro’s picture. Both films were about women falling for fish men at a laboratory. However, the Netherlands Film Academy eventually ruled that each film has “their own very different identities” and “are not in any conceivable way interlinked or related.” Here’s their statement, released last month:
After recently screening ‘The Shape of Water’ and following conversations that took place in a very constructive and friendly atmosphere, The Netherlands Film Academy believes that both ‘The Shape of Water’ and our short, ‘The Space Between Us,’ have their own very different identities. They have separate timelines of development and are not in any conceivable way interlinked or related. The students and “The Space Between Us” team were very excited and grateful to have the opportunity to actively discuss the creative inspirations of both films in a personal conversation with Mr. del Toro. We cordially discussed our films and our common roots in mythology and the fantastic (and some themes which Mr. del Toro has previously dwelled on Hellboy I and II). We have learned a lot from the contact with an extremely gifted and creative filmmaker and wish ‘The Shape of Water’ continued success.
Meanwhile, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet pointed out similarities between a scene in his 1991 classic “Delicatessen,” where Richard Jenkins and Sally Hawkins do a little foot dance on a sofa.
And now a third accusation has landed. Late playwright Paul Zindel‘s representatives have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in which they claim del Toro lifted elements from Zindel’s play “Let Me Hear Your Whisper,” which dealt with a woman falling for a dolphin a top-secret laboratory. Del Toro quickly responded, telling Deadline,“I have never read nor seen the play. I’d never heard of this play before making ‘The Shape of Water,’ and none of my collaborators ever mentioned the play.”
Del Toro’s romantic fantasy is nominated for 13 Oscars and currently the front-runner to win Best Picture come March 4th, so it is not surprising that these claims are occurring precisely at this moment in time. However, given the fact that they all have to do with plagiarism, it must be quite disheartening for del Toro whose film does deal with familiar cinematic tropes but still feels like something we’ve never seen before.
The Oscars will be handed out on March 4th.