The Shape of Winning

It's official - The Shape of Water has won Best Picture at the 90th Academy Awards, and is the first since Spotlight to do so without the envelope switcheroo that took place last year. But a sequel would be in order right about now because everybody knows at this point that you haven’t really made it until you’ve got one of those fancy cinematic universes, filled to the brim with cameos and after-credit scenes and wiki pages keeping meticulous track of the status of Samuel L. Jackson’s eye patch. So who can blame Greta Gerwig - who was nominated for Best Director at the Oscars for her recent coming-of-age hit Lady Bird (but lost to somebody with a PENIS of all appendages) - for wanting to get in on that densely mythologic action? Not that Gerwig intends to shove a couple of Infinity Stones into her gentle teen dramedy, or even revisit the life of Lady Bird McPherson - rather, it’s her home town of Sacramento, California that’s got her interested. The director recently told Vanity Fair that she’s hoping to make a cycle of films set in the California capital, settling on a quartet as a good, even number. “There’s still lots of different parts of Sacramento that I’d like to explore, too,” she told interviewers. “I feel like I have the privilege of being from a place, and I’m really from that place. My family’s still there, and my friends are still there. I feel like I can actually speak to it with some feeling.” Despite Lady Bird’s own teenage judgment of it as a place divorced from real culture - like New Hampshire - the city has embraced the film’s affectionate eye on it. There are walking tours of the city devoted to the film, showcasing sites like Thrift Town, or the big blue house that serves as Lady Bird’s dream home, and the city’s tourism board have called the film “a little gem that drops out of the sky.”