“No, I didn’t like The Shape of Water. I know I’m supposed to like it. Yes Guillermo del Toro is fabulous blah blah blah. Yes it was beautiful to look at. Yes the ‘creature’ was sexy and almost, kinda -- naked. Yes the acting was fabulous, and pretty well anything that Sally Hawkins does I love. She could just read a book or shine her shoes and I would watch. It’s just...okay. This is it. It took me a while to figure out that Richard Jenkins was the gay character and when I did, well I was just soooooo....disappointed! Why? Because okay...there he is, wearing his little sweater with the elbow patches, living all alone with his cats, and then when he makes that very shy approach to the young blonde man who runs the restaurant -- and then he gets so cruelly and homophobically rejected, I just -- ummm. Well, I just couldn’t. It’s just the whole image of this terribly nice man, who likes to have tea with his female mute best friend, and that’s his life. (Is this revealing something about me?) No, I’m not saying that there aren’t some terribly nice gay men who live all alone with cats in crumby apartments and have mute female friends that they adore having tea with. I’m just saying that that is the image of us that straight people are most comfortable with. I mean, it makes them feel a lot better about us than to think that we don’t live alone, or we don’t like cats, or we don’t have time for our mute female friends because we’re much too busy fucking in the back room at the Eagle. Do you get what I’m saying? And I don’t know if that’s a reason for me to reject the whole movie. And well -- I don’t reject the whole movie -- well maybe I do. And I realize it’s probably going to get a thousand and one Oscars. But it’s just one of those movies that manages to include every minority group. I mean there’s a gay man, and a disabled woman, and a black woman and even the ‘creature’ it turns out is kind of ‘trans.’ No, he is! Remember when Sally Hawkins has that conversation with Octavia Spencer who asks if the ‘creature’ has a penis and Sally says that it’s kind of hidden away -- yes for sure, the ‘creature’ is meant to be trans. Yes, so in this way Guillermo has like covered almost every shape and size of minority group and has proved by this movie that he is on the side of all of them. And all I can say is, as a member of one of those minority groups portrayed in this movie, I feel kinda taken advantage of. And it’s not because I don’t ever like any movies ever, that’s not true. For instance I like......well my most recent fave movie was I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore starring the super-duper talented Melanie Lynsky. Yes, it’s on Netflix. And yes, I really liked that movie a lot. But I didn’t so much like The Shape of Water. Oscars or no Oscars. Sorry.”
