On a recent episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host griped that this year’s Best Picture nominees were a bunch of woke, virtue-signalling “downers,” foisted on audiences to make them feel “guilty, dirty, and bad.” Maher is the product of the “Easy Rider” generation, for whom (at least in hindsight) progress was a pot-filled party, but it’s hard not to see him as the 2021 equivalent of the “Oliver!” voter, who just wanted movies to “entertain,” like they used to. Three years after the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the Academy has its first #MeToo nominee, in the form of “ Promising Young Woman.” Five years after the #OscarsSoWhite implosion, the Best Picture list includes “ Minari” and “Judas and the Black Messiah,” movies by and about people of color, and “ Nomadland,” a portrait of all-American late-capitalist drift, circa now, as told by a female Chinese director.
Prestige studio products, including Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” were postponed, perhaps giving oxygen to smaller contenders, such as “The Father” and “Sound of Metal.” And yet few in Hollywood can foresee whether the movie industry will return to “normal” after the pandemic, or whether the seeds of the streaming new normal have already grown roots.Īt the same time, Hollywood has grappled with-and, some might say, commodified-issues of racial and gender parity. moved its big-screen releases to HBO Max Netflix became a lockdown-era cultural commons even L.A.’s beloved multiplex the ArcLight Hollywood was forced to shut its doors. As Academy voters streamed the nominated films, they were forced to contemplate tectonic shifts in their industry: Warner Bros. But what will this year’s Best Picture slate reveal to observers a half century from now? They’ll surely remember these as the Pandemic Oscars, an elongated awards season during which moviegoing was, by necessity, a stay-at-home affair. Both films arrived on the heels of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which made 1969 seem less past than prologue. “ Judas and the Black Messiah” goes inside the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton, who was assassinated that December.
“ The Trial of the Chicago 7” dramatizes the politicized court proceedings against activists who, the year before, protested the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Two of this year’s eight Best Picture nominees are set largely in 1969, and they show what Hollywood wouldn’t bring itself to see back then. By the next year, movies like “ Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” finally injected the ceremony with a dose of sixties counterculture-but the decade was over. Under the newly devised rating system, “Oliver!” became the first G-rated film to win Best Picture, and it remains the last. How many awards do you think Netflix will eventually end up taking home? Let us know in the comments down below.In 1969, as revolutionary fires burned, the Academy gave its Best Picture award to “Oliver!” Hollywood, still ruled by the crumbling studio system, was almost willfully blind to the nineteen-sixties even breakthrough films such as “ 2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Rosemary’s Baby” were left off the Best Picture list, which included representatives of such superannuated genres as the big-budget musical (“Funny Girl”) and the medieval costume drama (“The Lion in Winter”).
Note: Titles marked with an asterisk are Netflix Originals internationally distributed.
Here’s every nomination Netflix scored for 2021 ( full list of Oscar nominations here):
is nominated for 10 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Actor in a Leading Role for Gary Oldman, and Actress in a Supporting Role for Amanda Seyfried! #OscarNoms /cx8qW6KSFCįull List of Netflix Oscar Nominations for 2021 Mank walks away with the most award nominations of all movies featured hauling 10 award nominations in total. The only categories Netflix failed to get nominations in was the international feature film and short film (live-action) categories. Here’s how that compares to Netflix’s previous nomination hauls: It’s also worth noting that Netflix is currently carrying The Present which was nominated for best short live-action short film but does not carry Netflix Original branding.