Women in Hollywood felt some long overdue love on Tuesday when Oscar nominations rained in for movies about their stories and for the actresses and directors who bring them to life.
In the best actress category, Hawkins was nominated for The Shape of Water, McDormand for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Robbie for I, Tonya.
Fox Searchlight's fantastical romance The Shape of Water and its dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri emerged as front runners for the Oscar best picture prize after capturing nominations in all of the major categories.
The Shape of Water earned a leading 13 nominations, including nods for best picture, screenplay, director Guillermo del Toro and actors Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins and Octavia Spencer.
Meryl Streep extended her lead as the most-nominated actor ever to 21, with her nomination for The Post, Steven Spielberg's drama about the Washington Post's decision to publish secret papers about the Vietnam War.
Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed best picture nominee Lady Bird, a story about a teenage girl brimming with self assurance, got rare female directing and screenplay Oscar nominations. Actresses Saiorse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf were also recognised for Lady Bird.
"It's fantastic for women and given the year that we've had, I think those nominations are popping out even stronger. They're more apparent because of the year we've been through," Metcalf told Reuters.
The nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences followed years of campaigning for equal pay and better opportunities behind the camera, a movement that has been boosted by women breaking their silence in recent months over sexual abuse and harassment in the entertainment industry.
"The one clear trend in this award season is the empowerment of women," said Tom O'Neil, founder of awards website GoldDerby.com.
"It is rare that films with a female point of view do well in the best picture race, but this year we have four movies that are front-runners - Lady Bird, Three Billboards, The Shape of Water and The Post," he said.
Only one woman - Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010 - has ever won a best director Oscar. On Tuesday Gerwig brought the number of women nominated in that category to five.
However, the superhero film Wonder Woman, a box office hit in 2017 raking in $US825 million globally, and its director Patty Jenkins were snubbed. That was in keeping with a tradition of generally cool treatment of action and sci-fi movies at the Academy Awards.
Award shows in the run-up to this year's Oscars have been dominated by women's issues.
Actresses turned out dressed in black en masse for the Golden Globes this month to signal support for victims of sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry and beyond. At the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday, all the presenters were women.
To be sure, the movies now vying for the most prestigious honors in the film industry were filmed before multiple allegations of impropriety against producer Harvey Weinstein triggered the #MeToo social movement and led to the downfall of dozens of powerful men in US entertainment, business and politics. Weinstein has denied having non-consensual sex with anyone.
But the movement created an environment where attention was ready to focus on movies about women of all varieties.
In the past, "the stories that we have seen in general have been the stories of white men, and we are tired and done with it," said Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood blog.
SURPRISE CONTENDERS
This year's surprises include four nominations - including best picture, and best actor for Daniel Kaluuya - for Jordan Peele's Get Out, in which an African-American man finds himself trapped at his white girlfriend's house with her strange family.
The $US5 million horror movie from Universal Pictures became a box office success with more than $US250 million globally and became a talking point around modern day race relations in America.
"I think that there's a piece of the black experience that is communicated in the film and through Daniel's performance that people of color recognize and haven't seen and that people not of color needed to see as well," Peele told Reuters.
Veteran actor Christopher Plummer (88) was also a surprise contender in the supporting actor race for Sony Pictures' Getty kidnapping film All the Money in the World.
Plummer boarded the movie a month before its release, replacing actor Kevin Spacey because of sexual misconduct allegations.
Plummer stepped in after Spacey was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple men. Spacey issued an apology for the first reported incident, involving actor Anthony Rapp.
"Everything has happened so quickly of late that I am still a trifled stunned but excited by it all," Plummer said in a written statement of his nomination.
James Franco was excluded from the best actor race for The Disaster Artist after facing accusations of sexual misconduct earlier this month following his Golden Globe win.
Franco said the accusations were "not accurate." He lost out on Sunday at the Screen Actors Guild awards to Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour.
Other snubs included Steven Spielberg in the directing race for press freedom movie The Post, and its star Tom Hanks.
Mudbound was left out of best picture and its filmmaker, Dee Rees, was also excluded from the directing race, but she landed a nod for adapted screenplay.
German film In The Fade, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign language film and received praise for its lead star Diane Kruger, was left out of the Oscar foreign language race.
