[COLUMN] This Year's Nominations Suggest Netflix Changed the Oscars - Just Not How They Expected | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

This week saw the announcement of the Oscar nominations. It was a good day for Netflix. The streamer picked up 18 nominations, more than any other studio. It marked a slight increase from last year, when the studio earned 16 nominations. However, these marked a sharp decline from the height of the studio’s awards prominence: 27 nominations in 2022, 36 nominations in 2021, 24 nominations in 2020.

Netflix has made no secret of its desire for awards glory. “We all want to be recognized by our peers as the best in class,” Netflix’s head of original films Scott Stuber told The Wall Street Journal in April 2021. The company has been willing to put its money where its mouth is. It reportedly spent “between $40 million and $60 million” promoting Roma, a film that cost just $15 million, for the 2019 awards. The following year, it spent $225 million on Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.

Netflix never managed to secure a return on its investment. At various points, the studio was pushing a film considered to be the favorite in the Best Picture race: Roma in 2019, The Irishman in 2020, The Power of the Dog in 2022. However, the streamer could never seal the deal. Netflix was frequently the most nominated studio, but only once managed to take home more trophies than its rivals. Even this year, the studio’s most nominated film, Maestro, is a de facto also-ran in most of its categories.

This humiliation was compounded when Apple beat Netflix to become the first streaming service to win Best Picture in March 2022. CODA was a comparatively modest undertaking compared to expensive projects like The Irishman or The Power of the Dog. Apple had picked the film up for just $25 million at Sundance, pocket change in the world of streaming. It was a humbling experience for Netflix. The streaming giant went into that ceremony with 27 nominations, and emerged with only a single win.

Just a month after CODA took home Best Picture for Apple, “the Great Netflix Correction” hit. Netflix’s stock collapsed, signaling the end of the streaming wars. In response, Netflix adjusted its internal priorities. By June 2022, there were reports that “that the era of expensive vanity projects at Netflix [was] likely over.” Stuber recently announced his departure. Although nobody would ever acknowledge as much publicly, it really felt like these twin factors had forced the studio to abandon its push for Oscars at any cost.

However, there is no denying that Netflix has fundamentally altered the Academy Awards. The streaming services are major competitors, and will continue to be. However, Netflix has also changed the Oscars in more subtle ways. This is obvious just looking at the kinds of films that are being nominated for (and winning) the major awards. The past few years have seen the Academy Awards embrace a larger volume on non-English-language films, and it feels like Netflix played a part.

Obviously, the Oscars have long recognized foreign-language cinema. The Academy started handing out trophies for Best Foreign-Language Film in 1947, launching a competitive category in 1956. However, as with the “ghettoization” that occurred with the Best Animated Feature category that was launched in response to Beauty and the Beast securing a Best Picture nomination in 1992, this separate category often served to create a ceiling for awards recognition for these subtitled works.

To be fair, there were occasionally films that broke through that barrier. In the first eight decades of the Oscars, there were only ten films to be nominated for Best Picture in a language other than English: Grand Illusion, Z, The Emigrants, Cries and Whispers, Il Postino, Life is Beautiful, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Amour. That is a fairly paltry number, reinforcing Bong Joon-ho’s observations that the Oscars are “very local” in their sensibility.

However, there has been a palpable shift in recent years. Starting with the nomination of Roma in 2019, every slate of Best Picture nominees has contained at least one film largely in a language other than English: Parasite in 2020, Minari in 2021, Drive My Car in 2022 and All Quiet on the Western Front in 2023. (It’s also worth acknowledging that large portions of CODA were also subtitled.) This year, three such films were nominated: Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives and The Zone of Interest.

The year after Roma was nominated, Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar. It appeared that Academy voters had managed to overcome what director Bong Joon-ho had described as “the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” These sorts of nominations became the rule rather than the exception. Rather than being seen as curios or oddities, these movies could often break out as dark horse frontrunners in major categories.

Netflix would learn this firsthand. In 2023, the studio bet big on Andrew Dominik’s Blonde as an awards contender, but the film was dead on arrival outside of Ana de Armas’s performance. Netflix also failed to gain awards traction with Noah Baumbach’s White Noise. The streamer filled the gap with All Quiet on the Western Front, a German-language war film. Leaving “people flabbergasted over their morning coffee”, it secured 9 nominations, tying with The Banshees of Inisherin as the second-most-nominated film of the year.

There is an impulse to suggest that these nominations come as a result of the efforts made to diversify the Academy’s membership, overseen by Cheryl Boone Isaacs. That has undoubtedly been a factor in some of the institution’s bolder choices in recent years. However, All Quiet on the Western Front is a very different film than an arthouse choice like Drive My Car. Remove the language barrier and it’s demonstrably closer to a conservative “dad movie” choice like 1917 than it is to a big swing like Parasite.

There is a strain of anti-intellectual punditry that would cite these nominations as proof that the Academy Awards is “out of touch” with the values of its presumed audience, which would argue that movies with subtitles are among “the vegetables of movies.” Ironically, this criticism itself seems out of touch with how modern audiences approach films. It reflects an outdated view of foreign-language cinema as an artform confined to specialist video stores and inaccessible to the masses.

Audiences’ relationship to foreign-language media has shifted in recent years, and Netflix is a large part of that. The service is truly global. Only 77.3 million of the company’s 247.2 million subscribers are based in the United States and Canada, and the company has been making aggressive appeals to large international markets like India and Japan. That has meant funding and distributing content specific to those cultures with a worldwide platform.

Because Netflix’s originals stream around the world, viewers in America are receiving recommendations for programming from increasingly diverse sources, often in different languages. These movies and shows are just a click away, often pushed to the front of the audience’s streaming queue. More than that, there is evidence that subscribers have accepted these invitations to watch more international media.

Although House of Cards put Netflix on the map, its first original series was a Norwegian crime series starring Steve Van Zandt, Lilyhammer. In 2015, the service launched Narcos. It became a surprise hit with critics and audiences and even launched a spin-off, with another in the works. In 2021, the Korean show Squid Game became the streaming service’s biggest ever hit. Netflix has figured out that it can import international content and turn it into buzzy, watercooler television.

Streaming metrics are opaque, so it’s hard to quantify the level of market penetration. However, it seems like Netflix has enjoyed massive success with non-English-language shows like Lupin, Dark and Money Heist. It has also brought specific international subgenres to general audiences, like Korean dramas (“K-Dramas”) or reality television dating shows. In August 2021, Netflix revealed that 97% of its American users had watched a non-English-language show in the previous year.

“There seems to be a change in the audience’s reception, and I think that is not just due to theatrical films, but mostly because of series and streamers,” argued producer Malte Grunert of the awards success enjoyed by All Quiet on the Western Front. “The enormous success of [Netflix’s] Narcos, Money Heist, or Dark has brought with it an audience with a willingness to see films in the original language, to read subtitles. That certainly is different to what it was 20 years ago.”

In March 2023, Netflix announced that viewers had logged a total of 150 million hours watching All Quiet on the Western Front. Allowing for the film’s runtime, this suggests around 60 million total watches. That suggests that it was one of the more widely-seen of Best Picture nominees, particularly compared to contenders like Triangle of Sadness (with a box office of $26 million), Women Talking (with a box office of $9 million) and even TÁR (with a box office of $29 million).

Of course, it’s worth acknowledging this doesn’t mean that all of these viewers are reading subtitles. Netflix does provide English-language dubs for many of its non-English-language releases. However, even watching the best dub of a live action film, there is a dissonance. Audiences understand that they are watching something that was not written or shot in English. It is heartening to discover that audiences are not turned away by that.

There has been a lot written (and quite justifiably) about how Netflix has damaged the film and television landscape, particularly in the way that it forced many of its rivals to compete with it to disastrous results. However, there is some evidence that Netflix has done some good for the wider culture, even outside of funding movies that might not have been viable in the traditional studio system, like Roma, Mudbound, and The Irishman.

Netflix has helped to normalize the idea of film and television as a truly international artform. It has broken down the boundaries that existed between “domestic” and “foreign” media. It demonstrated that a movie or show didn’t need to be a “specialty” release just because it wasn’t in English. It suggested that audiences can be encouraged to follow and embrace their curiosity, to venture outside their comfort zones with the right level of encouragement.

This may be Netflix’s greatest legacy at the Academy Awards, despite never taking home the Best Picture prize. The studio has done a lot to make film truly global, and this year’s crop of nominees reflect that reality. Anatomy of a Fall, Past Lives, and The Zone of Interest are all fascinating films. In particular, Anatomy of a Fall and Past Lives are as watchable and accessible as any other nominees. The only difference is the subtitles, and those are no longer a barrier to entry.