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What a difference a year makes. One year ago, Netflix’s failure to get even one nomination for their heralded narrative feature Beasts of No Nation had people wondering if the Hollywood community was ever going to let a streaming platform like Netflix onto the Oscars ballot. A year later, a different streaming platform ended up with a very different result: Manchester by the Sea, the independent drama that Amazon Studios picked up at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, not only got 6 Oscar nominations in total, but it’s been nominated for Best Picture. It’s a first for Amazon, a first for streaming, and it’s now legitimized Amazon Studios as an Oscar player.
The “why”s of Amazon succeeding where Netflix failed are ultimately conjecture without hearing from Oscar voters, but it’s not hard to speculate. Netflix barely released Beasts of No Nation into theaters, where it made under $100,000. Its major release strategy was to make Beasts available on streaming, where it was available to a wider audience, yes, but it also felt like an end-run around Hollywood practice. Counter that with the way Amazon handled Manchester, which got the traditional kind of platform release that most small awards contenders get, adding theaters over its first five weeks and making, to date, nearly $40 million at the box office. When it does make it to Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service, it’ll be free to stream, but only after behaving like a traditional theatrical release. In this way, Amazon Studios is functioning no different from a Fox Searchlight or a Open Road, two indie studios who have taken the last three Best Picture awards.
Netflix, meanwhile, has seen their own share of Oscar success in the documentary categories, where Oscar voters have gotten used to nominating movies that skirt the usual theatrical release patterns. For years, Oscar-nominated docs have fulfilled the cursory requirements for Oscar nomination (a film must screen theatrically for a period of one week within the calendar year) but have primarily screened on television (HBO and PBS, most often) or, more recently, Netflix. This year, O.J.: Made in America, a 7-hour-plus documentary that aired as a five-part mini-series on ESPN, was nominated for Best Documentary Feature because it screened as a complete film at some festivals before getting that cursory theatrical run. It’s the heavy favorite to win. But, despite being perhaps the single best-reviewed “film” of the year, it never even tried to push for a Best Picture nomination, because, as Netflix learned last year, the voters judge that category differently.
Netflix pulled in one Documentary Feature nomination this year, for Ava DuVernay’s powerful film 13th, as well as documentary shorts Extremis and The White Helmets. In 2014 and 2015, Netflix was able to grab two Documentary Feature nominations apiece. Stacked up against Manchester‘s massive triumph, these are small victories, but this is the lane Netflix has chosen, at least when it comes to its awards chances.
Amazon, meanwhile, will only be emboldened by today’s success — which included nominations for Kenneth Lonergan in Best Director and Best Screenplay, plus acting nods for Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, and Lucas Hedges. And with films like Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck on the way, the path has been cleared for future Oscar attention.
