The W-word has Hollywood searching for the holy grail of how to win the big prize
When it all gets too much, do you ever console yourself with the thought that Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma won three Oscars last year? The further we get from the 2019 cycle, the more marvellous it seems that Netflix was able to turn a blackand-white, Spanish-language, famous-face-less, streaming-servicebacked, unapologetically upmarket critical darling into a mainstream contender at the 91st Academy Awards.
True, it didn’t win Best Picture. But it did take the equivalent honour at the Baftas, making it the first film without English dialogue to do so since Jean de Florette in 1988: no mean feat. Why didn’t this feel more extraordinary at the time? Probably because Roma’s campaign made its presence in the thick of the conversation feel like a no-brainer: it was an internationally popular director’s visionary passion project, which just happened to swish on to the scene in art house guise.
In doing so, Roma’s story was surprisingly at odds with that of A Star Is Born – a seemingly obvious Oscar heavyweight whose arc turned into one of the all-time-great fizzle-outs, ending with just a solitary statuette, for Best Original Song.
Since 2018, Netflix’s awards office has been run by Lisa Taback, a veteran campaigner who led The King’s Speech and Spotlight to glory in the pre-streaming age. Securing Roma three Oscars confirmed her nous and suggested in the future anything could be possible. Except oddly, this year, it hasn’t been.
Netflix breezed into
2020 with what looked like a fearsome Oscar slate: half a dozen mostly widely admired titles that premiered during the autumn festival period, plus some buzzy documentaries and a couple of highly regarded animations. As the season took shape, two of those features, Marriage Story and The Two Popes, were able to amass that elusive but covetable property, “awards momentum” – while a third, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, seemed to magnetise votes.
Once the first round ballots were counted, Netflix had amassed an impressive 24 Oscar and 23 Bafta nominations from across their entire portfolio, almost half of which were accounted for by The Irishman alone. Yet the conversion rate so far has been worryingly lean, particularly given the streaming giant’s reported $100million spend on campaigns (a sum they dispute: for an ordinary studio, $50-$60million would be a more typical sum).
Of their 23 Bafta nods, only two came good, for Laura Dern’s supporting performance in Marriage Story, and their Christmas-themed animated feature Klaus. And while we won’t know their Oscar tally until the early hours of Monday, a similar result seems likely: the Academy will almost certainly go for Dern again, and possibly also American Factory in Best Documentary.
But anything more – even Martin Scorsese for Best Director – now seems like a long shot.
What went wrong? A New York Times report earlier this week suggested the Academy’s old guard had become wary of Netflix’s increasingly grit-toothed determination to add a Best Picture Oscar to the streaming company’s ever-growing trophy cabinet. The W-word was also darkly invoked: “It reminds them of the days when Harvey Weinstein solicited Oscar votes with no-stoneunturned vigour,” the piece read. It might well. But let’s not forget that for around 15 years, these same voters responded very warmly to Weinstein’s solicitations, elevating the now-disgraced former Miramax mogul into the Hollywood collective id incarnate. The triumph of Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan in 1999 signalled the successful and total Harveyfication of awards season: votes had been recast as statements, and campaigns as stories which voters could steer to a happy Hollywood ending, should they so choose.
Intriguingly – not least since Taback was a one-time Weinstein protégée – Netflix’s 2020 campaigns have shied away from the Weinstein-brand approach. The Irishman has been positioned as a masterpiece of weight and import, and a last-in-a-lifetime reunion of cinema legends: Scorsese, De Niro, Pesci, Pacino. And Marriage Story’s campaign has focused on the depth and finesse of its craft – a well-liked cast, an elegant screenplay, a command of space and performance that recalls great theatre.
Which strikes a very different tone to, say, Warner Bros’ highly emotive campaign for Joker, which positions the nihilistic comic-book riff as a soul-plumbing movie of the moment. “Joker proves the power of empathy,” ran a recent ad, which continued: “Joker conveys an idea, and boiled down to one word it is ‘compassion’. You might even say that compassion is the movie’s superpower.” (I like Joker a lot, but this is rubbish.)
Or take Fox Searchlight’s Jojo Rabbit operation, which frames the “anti-hate satire” as a timely plea for decency and understanding, complete with a black and white promotional shoot of its photogenic cast insouciantly flashing peace signs.
The 1917 team has played up its film’s undoubted technical mastery – but also its director Sam Mendes’s personal connection to the story, which was inspired by tales told to him by his grandfather of life on the Western Front.
Then there’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: the film to vote for “because you love movies”, according to its own promotional material, which is surely the season’s most distinctively Weinsteiny line. Some of us were reminded of Weinstein’s 2015 campaign for the dirge-like Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, which exhorted the Academy to “Honour the man. Honour the film.” (Best Adapted Screenplay aside, they declined.)
Little Women and Parasite have both played things fairly straight. The former has been sold as a brilliant reinvigoration of a classic text; the latter on its all-round virtuosity, and rare cultural cut-through for a subtitled picture. As for Le Mans ’66, known in the US as Ford v Ferrari – has it even been running a Best Picture campaign? It just seems happy to be here.
What does this all tell us? As the Weinstein rape trial enters its second month, Hollywood is still squirming – and not just over the evidence currently emerging in a New York courthouse. Weinstein changed how the film business celebrated itself, and Netflix is only joining in with a game that’s been in progress for years. If they don’t like what they see – the obstinacy, the calculation – that’s entirely on them.