But, if franchise films can do just fine without the Oscars, the Academy may have recognized that it goes both ways, and has made its choice.
FRENCH DIS STREAMING FREE
The viewership of the Oscars broadcast has been in free fall in recent years, and there has been speculation that a Best Picture nomination for “ Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which is closing in on three-quarters of a billion dollars in North American ticket sales, would get the show some attention. It’s a wonderful film, and I’m not surprised that Academy members who saw it were impressed I’m surprised that they saw it at all, and I think that, for once, critics’ groups that named it Best Picture (including the two I’m in, the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle) were heard, because the very environment is different. One of the most pleasant surprises among the list of nominees is the quadruple presence (Best Picture, International Feature, Adapted Screenplay, and Directing) of “ Drive My Car,” Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s complex and lyrical drama, a minute short of three hours, about a grieving theatre director staging an unusual production of “Uncle Vanya” at a festival in Hiroshima. Because a streaming hit is less quantifiable-or, at least, because standards haven’t been established and services’ transparency doesn’t come close to that of box-office reporting-the notion of hit-ness becomes more subjective, more a matter of word of mouth and groundswells of opinion. But streaming does change the industry’s approach to the very concept of success. The shift toward streaming is no panacea for filmmakers the run of the streaming mill is no less homogenizing than is studio-centric production. “Being the Ricardos,” with its three acting nominations, is a Prime Video release, and “CODA,” with three nominations, including Best Picture, was released on Apple TV+ and in theatres on the same day. “ The Lost Daughter,” which garnered nominations for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s script and Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley’s performances, is also a Netflix film so is “ Tick, Tick . . . Among the nominees, “ Don’t Look Up” and “ The Power of the Dog” are Netflix films that had only nominal theatrical releases “Dune” and “King Richard” were released on HBO Max on the same day as their theatrical releases. But the real difference-the enduring one, which doesn’t seem likely to go away for medical reasons-is the shift from theatrical releases to streaming. Of course, the numbers come with a huge pandemic asterisk.
Steven Spielberg’s “ West Side Story,” with its thirty-seven-million-dollar domestic gross on a reported hundred-million-dollar budget, would be considered a flop.
FRENCH DIS STREAMING CRACKED
Only “ Dune” cracked the hundred-million-dollar line for North American ticket sales, barely. There are good movies and even great ones nestled among this year’s roster, but not a single commercial hit, by the classic box-office standard.
The Academy-which chooses the ten Best Picture nominees as a whole and has the members of particular craft divisions choose their category’s five entries-has mapped out a vision of Hollywood that plays like a template for a restart: a turnkey house of movies that’s ready to go for when the pandemic subsides and viewership returns. The Oscar nominations this year have the kind of balance and range that suggests a happy equilibrium, an embrace of modernity and tradition, heart-tugs and razzle-dazzle, glamour and substance, depicting a wide variety of experiences, places, and cultures.
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