Until the last minute of 2021, the buzz can be seen. The power of the dogDirector Jane Champion’s Western fable about toxic masculinity, is on track to become the first Best Picture Oscar winner for Netflix. With a whopping 12 nominations total, it’s on the high end. By March, however, everything had changed. Suddenly CODAa movie about coming of age full of luck Apple TV + sleeping in Sundance last year, gained traction. It won top honors at both the Screen Actors Guild Awards and Producers Guild of America Awards while Dog seems to be chasing its tail. On Sunday it was decided: CODA won top honors, marking the first time a streaming service has done so.
This has been a long time, and that time is over. Ever since Netflix and Amazon started scouring for prestige content in hopes of winning titles (and respect), Hollywood has been curiously waiting to see if the streaming service can win the biggest prize. of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or not. trophy. Not everyone in the industry is interested in players like Netflix making big wins, mainly because the company is credited with moving movies out of theaters and into living rooms. When Netflix’s Rome is a play to win the top prize in 2019, an Oscar campaign advisor tell Vulture that voting for Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white family drama was “a vote for the death of cinema by TV.” Steven Spielberg, who has West story was nominated for seven awards this year and won one, bluntly arguing that Netflix movies don’t qualify for Oscars, claim they are more like TV series. Now, it looks like the streamers are going to win big.
While it seems unthinkable that a streaming service would never won Best Picture, exactly how it should play out, or should happen, is another point of contention. Amazon got lucky soon, bought it Manchester by the sea at Sundance and then racked up multiple Oscar nominations in 2017. Netflix, while it certainly has films at film festivals, has had better luck with its homegrown endeavors like Irish people and Rome. But that doesn’t mean the two haven’t faltered. Netflix has 35 nods and Amazon hit 12 last year, but the latter received only a nod — for Great disease-Next year Manchester win. Neither of them managed to win the top prize, despite constantly swirling around it.
All of which makes Apple’s victory extremely shocking. After years of Netflix and Amazon trying to produce and take the lead—despite the disdain the old-school kids in Hollywood may have—Apple has succeeded with a movie it just screened at Sundance. Okay, it paid a pretty penny for CODA– reported to be around $25 million – but it still beats Power and a bunch of other juggernauts, like Warner Bros. Sand dunes and films by previous Oscar winners such as Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro (Nightmare Alley). For a streaming service that, despite being backed by a pile of Apple cash, only launched in November 2019, that’s huge. One could also argue that production and release delays caused by Covid-19 have made room for smaller films to make more noise than in previous years, but even so, the series That smaller movie could have come from an independent studio like A24, not Apple.
But the Oscars happen overnight. The impact of this victory will be felt for a while, both in Hollywood and in the broadcasters’ offices. Over the past few years, Netflix has been pushing for an Oscar — and perhaps lost some of its power in the process – so what happens now that Apple has beaten them to the grand prize? Without a doubt, it will generate more plays, but for now CODA demonstrated what a successful operation looks like, will Netflix imitate that success? Will Amazon? Will the studio? Apple TV+’s win proves that the old grudge against streamers is over (or at least lessened) and there’s a good chance one of them can win. Audiences now know that the best movies in the world are just one click away. Traditional studios understand that their distribution model can and should be changed without affecting how their movies are received.
For a long time, streamers’ disruption of Hollywood was like a battle for the soul of Tinsel Town – how it’s run, who gets into it, the definition of a ” movie” even how. Honestly, there might be something to that. Filmmaking and filmmaking have thrived for years because film is such a huge cultural currency. They are also an art form that has been overtaken by major corporations looking to make movies that are outright but guaranteed to sell and box to theaters. For many years, especially in the 1990s when Oscar viewership was much higher than it is today, the winners of Best Picture were artistic crowd pleasers like Titanic and Forrest Gump, the film won over critics and kills at the box office. The team of films and filmmakers, even managed to capture a tiny golden man.
