Three years ago marked the first awards season after quarantine restrictions were lifted. Nonetheless, it was still an odd and somewhat muted Oscar season due to productions freezing in Hollywood the year before. As a consequence, the Oscar field seemed strangely muted in January 2022 with the initial frontrunner being a critical favorite that was awarded Best Picture by prestigious critics groups like the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as a Netflix release: Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. The critical and media narrative was that it had to win. Campion was the clear frontrunner for Best Director, and what could beat it for Picture? (Personally, we far preferred Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, but that musical flopped, so it was a nonstarter with the Academy).
Come Oscar night, the Academy again found a way to deny Netflix a Best Picture Oscar, but only in lieu of giving the top award to another streaming film, Apple and Sian Heder’s feel-good and easily accessible CODA. It was also a film nominated for only two other awards, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. It won both.
While CODA has arguably gone down as one of the slighter Best Picture winners in recent memory, it also was the antithesis of The Power of the Dog: hopeful, earnest, and ultimately reassuring in a dark moment that things were going to be alright. It also was not a Netflix movie, and while Apple is in the streaming business, only Netflix has seen leadership state more than once that they do not consider theatrical their business model.
Cut back to 2025. We again are in a bit of a slow-down year after film production dried up in 2023 due to the writer and actor strikes. The mood is also once more mournful in much of the country, especially California. The general sense in the industry and media is that 2024 was a weaker year for cinema than the past several, and one of the frontrunners which is again a critical darling and NYFCC Best Picture winner is a dark, cynical, and ultimately dispiriting auteur piece: The Brutalist. Furthermore, according to Variety, a not-insignificant number of Academy members are refusing to watch the 3.5-hour epic. Yes, there is another frontrunner which has a more hopeful and optimistic message, the lightning rod musical Emilia Pérez, but that film is still a Netflix release. And this one comes with a lot of online controversy and baggage.
Admittedly, online backlash didn’t thwart Green Book‘s chances in early 2019. However, its biggest competitor was, guess what, another Netflix film in Alfonso Cuarón’s lyrical Roma. Also it seems online sentiment did play a role in La La Land’s stumble two years earlier, a film so securely seen as the frontrunner that when it was incorrectly named Best Picture at the 2017 Academy Awards, no one at home or in the audience guessed anything was amiss.
Lastly, one other major factor to remember is that Best Picture, unlike all other categories at the Oscars, are voted on by way of preferential ballot. This means that instead of just picking their favorite, each voter ranks the nominees in order from their most desirous to their least for taking home the top prize. And it seems likely while Emilia Pérez will receive a lot of “number one” votes, it could end up either number nine or 10 on plenty of other ballots too.