Were it to go on and take Best Picture at the Oscars in March, it certainly wouldn't be out of step with recent winners such as Nomadland (2021) and Parasite (2020): chewy, complex works aimed at connoisseur audiences who want to be stung and inspired. But it is very different to the blockbusting Best Picture winners of around 20 years ago – an era when the Academy's annual top honour went to the crowd-pleasing likes of Forrest Gump, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, Gladiator, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
So why have Oscars voters' tastes grown pricklier and less commercial of late? It can be no coincidence that the shift has coincided with the rise of Netflix itself – whose pitch to the industry almost ten years ago was that it was the place where directors and actors would be allowed to make exactly those sorts of films, with minimal outside interference. And credit to it, it was as good as their word.
The streamer's heftiest awards contenders to date have included Alfonso Cuarón's deeply personal black-and-white memoir-film Roma and David Fincher's long-gestating (and similarly monochrome) vintage passion project Mank.
This year's harvest alone includes Maggie Gyllenhaal's spiky adaptation of Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter; the aforementioned Tick, Tick…Boom!, and Adam McKay's sprawling all-star, climate-change satire Don't Look Up. And above the entire crop looms The Irishman, Martin Scorsese's sombre and ruminative three-and-a-half-hour underworld epic no traditional studio would fund.
None of Netflix's films has yet won Best Picture (though The Power of the Dog could well change that). But the mere fact of their existence – or rather, that they were able to exist just the way their creators want, without concessions to the great ticket-buying unwashed – tellingly aligns with a broader shift in the sorts of films the industry most wanted to celebrate.
For battle-scarred cinephiles, this presents a quandary. Obviously we want Scorsese to be able to spend whatever he likes on a book adaptation he's been mulling since the 1980s. But if we've any interest in the long-term health of our beloved medium, we need films for less zealous fans, those sorts of movies with old-fashioned glamour, awardable gravitas, and at least theoretical mainstream appeal which demand to be seen in an arthouse or multiplex venue. One of the main points of the Oscars, after all, is to get people into cinemas – not exactly a central pillar of Netflix's own business model.
Grand Oscar contenders of the 1990s type are thinner on the ground these days, but do still exist. In recent years, there have been convincing Best Picture runs by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, A Star is Born, Dunkirk, The Grand Budapest Hotel, even Mad Max: Fury Road. All were hugely popular and critically acclaimed. Yet in the end, all were largely (in the major categories, at least) awards-season bridesmaids.
This year's season seems likely to feature just two: West Side Story and Dune. You could argue that on the strength of its female star alone, the Lady Gaga-led House of Gucci makes a third – and In the Heights, another New York-set musical, a fourth. No Time to Die – an enormous, industry-buoying hit in Britain and around the world – has artistry, technical finesse and fine acting in abundance; it would be a more than worthy Best Film contender at the Oscars or the Baftas.
It's because the playing field is so conspicuously tilted that some pundits are currently claiming, with the straightest faces they can pull, that the not-especially-coherent but £1 billion-grossing Spider-Man: No Way Home deserves to be nominated for Best Picture. It doesn't, of course. But the argument can only gain traction because of the growing sense that a balance needs to be redressed. One of the boldest statements this year's voters could make is that "crowd-pleasing" are no longer dirty words.
