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Last year was the best chance for Netflix to win Best Picture with Emilia Perez. It was on track to be what we call the “SAG Standing Ovation” movie. That is, the movie that makes SAG/AFTRA leap to their feet with rapturous applause, first detected when the cast from Parasite took to the stage the year they won the ensemble award, before winning Best Picture.
We saw the same dynamic play out with CODA, which did the same thing. CODA was the first streaming film to be so perfect for the industry they didn’t even think about what its win meant for them and the survival of theatrical. We were all expecting Emilia Perez to be that movie this past year. How could it fail? A musical about an oppressive culture, a transgender lead, filled with women of color, and Zoe Saldana rounding the bases to win in supporting, Emilia Perez had it all.
They even had an anti-Trump message about immigration when they won at the Golden Globes.
To enthusiastic applause, Gascon said, “The light always wins over darkness. You can put us in jail. You can beat us up. You can put us in jail. But you can never take away our soul, our existence, our identity.”
Cut to: Her soul, her existence, and her identity would be taken away when someone dug up her old tweets and found she was not in compliance with the groupthink, and for that, she was branded a “Racist.”
Conclave would win the SAG ensemble award, and Netflix’s best chance to win would go up in flames, along with the fires that ravaged Los Angeles. Netflix went into damage control mode. They tried to silence her, complaining loudly and publicly when she appeared on CNN to explain her side of the story and plead her case.
In a story far more compelling and dramatic than any movie Hollywood will make about this era, we watched their virtue signals tangle around them like seaweed and pull them under. Gascon doesn’t know the modern-day Left very well because with them, it’s once accused, forever guilty.
That wouldn’t be the end of the story. The Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences would not invite Gascon to join the Academy. It wasn’t anything she did, mind you. It was the tweets. You must go along with them or they will DESTROY YOU. And your past must be scrubbed clean of all thought-crimes, or you aren’t welcome in the Academy.
The truth is that those kindly folks with their lawn signs and their pleas for “kindness” aren’t very kind at all.
Netflix must play the game if it wants to win Best Picture in utopia. And play the game they do. They have so much influence in the Oscar game and always have because Lisa Taback, once the whiz kid who brought in nominee after nominee for the Harvey Weinstein Oscar machine, is on the case. So far, she has brought in many nominees, sometimes two a year, but no winners.
Does Netflix want that prize? I think they did once, but I’m not sure that they want it badly enough now. What they want is to keep their subscribers feeling like they have something of value, especially considering they continue to raise their prices.
What are their prospects this year? They have several.
House of Dynamite, “Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Noah Oppenheim (who tackled the White House earlier this year in the limited series Zero Day), A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE is a sharp and visceral new story. Read on for more newly declassified information about the film.” Looks to be very timely to the right kinds of people. Who knows. I expect whatever the problem is it will be Trump’s fault, or rather, yet another ad for the Democrats. Hopefully I’m wrong.
Frankenstein, “Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro adapts Mary Shelley’s classic tale of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant but egotistical scientist who brings a creature to life in a monstrous experiment that ultimately leads to the undoing of both the creator and his tragic creation.”
The Ballad of a Small Player — On the heels of All Quiet on the Western Front and last year’s Conclave, Edward Berger is getting close to being ready for his Oscar close-up. “Farrell leads Ballad of a Small Player as Lord Doyle, a high-stakes gambler lying low in Macau, China. When his past and his debts start to catch up with him, Doyle encounters a kindred spirit who might just hold the key to his salvation.”
Jay Kelly, “The new film from Academy Award nominee Noah Baumbach, follows famous movie actor Jay Kelly (George Clooney) and his devoted manager Ron (Adam Sandler) as they embark on a whirlwind and unexpectedly profound journey through Europe. Along the way, both men are forced to confront the choices they’ve made, the relationships with their loved ones, and the legacies they’ll leave behind.”
These are their mostly Oscar-friendly fare. They also have The Woman in Cabin 10 with Kiera Knightly and another Knives Out sequel. I doubt either of them will be under consideration, so the question becomes which movie Netflix will rally behind and which of them could actually win Best Picture.
The real question is whether voters still hold Netflix responsible for the demise of movie theaters. And how much is their irritation at streaming competition laid at the feet of Netflix? It isn’t Netflix’s fault, exactly, but there is a sense of total surrender should the Academy finally decide to go that route. A win for Netflix might feel like the beginning of the end for an industry that still values movies on film and movies in theaters.
The same resistance happened with superhero movies. This is why Birdman won Best Picture in 2014. Superhero movies have threatened actors, but they may not be as threatened if the Academy heads into the insular world of streaming. Netflix gives them everything they ever wanted — they can luxuriate in art movies without worrying about their status as celebrities or the box office. It gives them lots of money to spend and creative freedom.
Creative freedom inside of a bubble where no free thought or free speech is allowed or tolerated is a double-edged sword. You have to play the game to be included. There is a market for daring films outside the bubble as long as they keep their budgets relatively small and tell compelling, original stories. That is what Netflix should be, but it isn’t that, not really. Like all corporate monopolies, it is beholden to the activists.
Ari Aster’s Eddington, for instance, is probably the only movie released this year that will, in any way, tell the truth about right now. Destroyed by the critics, not liked by audiences, it is nonetheless an honest take of our time. Here is Michael Tracy (not a film critic) writing about it:
Sure enough, this was for sure one of the craziest (in a good way) moviegoing experiences I’ve ever had. Within about 30 minutes, I keep thinking, “OK, they finally figured out how to film a movie from inside my internet-addled brain.” The swirling mania of our over-saturated, over-stimulated online lives — and the increasingly blinkered manifestations IRL — was perfectly captured, in a way one might have never assumed could be possible. Somehow, director Ari Aster (who I was not familiar with at all before this) managed to accurately represent just how much godforsaken time the average schlub now spends absent-mindedly scrolling their phones — and make it both bizarrely riveting, and hilarious. I was howling throughout, at moments which may have been mildly disturbing to some fellow theater-goers. (I often do this watching movies. Like if someone gets shot in the head out of the blue or something, my tendency is to laugh. Morbid humor, I guess?)
Characters vegetate endlessly on their devices, post delusional comments on comment threads, receive push-notifications, and earnestly encounter insane memes — many of which had me roaring, in large part because the whole phenomenological landscape was so eerily realistic. Hillary is a demon reptile, some post on an older woman’s Facebook feed blares; eventually the woman ends up rambling about 9/11 controlled demolitions. Ungrammatical wall-of-text ravings about Bill Gates emblazoned on MAGA-style pickup trucks. People arguing with one another over random nuggets of incorrect information they unwittingly absorbed from an algorithmic stew they never consciously immersed themselves in, but now can’t escape.
I don’t really buy, as Serious Reviewers have apparently argued, that there’s any singular political “message” to be discerned here. Such reviewers seem to overwhelmingly hate the movie, probably because they perceive it as sympathetic to the conspiratorial Right. The main character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, certainly is a guy that could be nebulously right-coded, insofar as he’s a smalltown Sheriff who impulsively decides to run for Mayor because he doesn’t like COVID mask mandates. But the artistic portrayal of this thoroughly recognizable archetype is spot-on, and I don’t see why a spot-on portrayal of a character has to be construed as any normative endorsement of that character. You’d think this would be understood as “Fiction 101,” but the reviewers brigading Rotten Tomatoes seem to increasingly struggle with making such distinctions. And so they are “negatively reviewing” what they regard to be objectionable political and cultural trends, ancillary to the movie, rather than the movie itself. Something very similar happened with Joker in 2019, when reviewers preemptively excoriated it en masse because they were under the impression that it was supposed to be a sympathetic depiction of dangerous right-wing incels or whatever. But that movie was brilliant, I thought, and so is Eddington. Joaquin Phoenix can’t catch a break! That guy is always great in everything. (Well, he’s a famous and wealthy celebrity, so I guess he caught a break.)
You can read the rest here – but one thing I can promise you without hesitation is that you won’t find writing or analysis that even comes close to this in the mainstream. You have to be a heretic, booted out of utopia, to even be able to access the truth, much less write about it. I expect Eddington will gain in stature in the next 20 years. If I don’t live that long, remember, you heard it here first.
Tracy was among the first journalists to even bother covering the destruction in Minneapolis to Black-Owned businesses. It was shocking that no other journalist would even touch it at the time, but he did. So Eddington hits differently from what he saw on the streets. Btw, he’s not a Trump supporter – and is such an independent thinker that he can be extremely irritating, no matter your side. But hey, if it gets him here, I’m all for it.
On multiple occasions I would stand there and watch as emotionally volatile white girls launched accusatory outbursts at older black cops, explaining that they were betraying their race by not abandoning their posts on the spot, while the cops stood stoically by, sometimes smirking, usually having no reaction at all. If memory serves, the black cop in the photo above was the local police chief, so the claim was that if he did not dissolve his department and surrender his career as the white girls demanded, he was enabling the racist system that murdered George Floyd. 2020 was wild. Even the fact that the movie has BLM protest/riots happening in sparsely populated New Mexico is accurate, because such events did happen in places where you’d have least expected it geographically, including across Rural/Exurban America.
So bravo to Ari Aster for taking such a bold risk, and bravo to A24 for allowing him to do so, no matter what the RT ratings are (and they’re not good). Eddington only cost $25 million, so it might make that back, especially since Joaquin Phoenix stepped out of his comfort zone and went on Theo Von.
What might not be as daring is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which takes us back into the same story Hollywood has been telling us, or at least that’s what it seems like from Jordan Ruimy’s synopsis of test screenings. It sounds like another “all of you are racists” kind of movie—condemnations of ICE, “white supremacists,” etc. Rinse, repeat.
A new trailer for One Battle After Another has been released, and it appears to have generated interest. 6 million views in nine days sounds promising. So far, so good.
If it is what it appears to be based on test screenings, I imagine it will struggle at the box office. Audiences are exhausted by now of being lectured and told they are not worthy of the lawn sign people. And not welcome.
A monoculture makes for bland entertainment. It is also the past. If you want to be part of the future, you can’t be left behind. You have to be willing to put yourself out there, damn the torpedoes.
Every time I see an email blast from Netflix pushed out by a blog, I am reminded once again about what I risked and what I’ve given up. I have to remind myself every time I struggle to pay my car payment that it’s just money. That ain’t the end of the world.
Netflix will do fine, and they will eventually win Best Picture. If not this year, then soon. Within the next five years, I figure, everyone will have all but given up on trying to save something that can’t be saved. Once they clear that hurdle, they will own the game in the same way Harvey Weinstein once did, so long ago.
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By: Sasha Stone
Title: The Buzzmeter: Can Netflix Ever Win Best Picture?
Sourced From: www.awardsdaily.com/2025/07/24/the-buzzmeter-can-netflix-ever-win-best-picture/
Published Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:15:11 +0000
