Best Director: Guillermo del Toro

By Kathryn Mohr

Best director has turned out to be one of the more exciting races of the Oscar season. Theoretically, any of these nominees could take home the statue – it just depends on what style the Academy wants to reward. The movies nominated are all so different that it's difficult to compare them to one another. How do you judge Greta Gerwig's intimate, emotional directing behind the coming of age drama Lady Bird up against Christopher Nolan's grandscale, time-bending war epic Dunkirk? I'm not sure you really can, which is why this race is so exciting. Anyone could win, it's just a matter of whether the Academy will favor those directors working on a more "epic" scale, or if they'll prefer a director who did more of a character study.

I think the winner will be a man who covers all those bases – Guillermo del Toro with The Shape of Water. Filmed on an incredibly low budget of $19.5 million, this movie has all the lush production value of a major Hollywood studio flick, the sweep of a Cold War crime epic, and an emotionally affecting romance between two unlikely … people. All cylinders are firing on del Toro's latest passion project – the beautiful sets, sounds, sights, and story come together to form an utterly entrancing and unforgettable movie. While anyone could win, come March 4 it might just be Del Toro joining the ranks of Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu as one of the few Mexican directors to ever win an Academy Award.