Has Netflix produced an Oscar contender – without even trying?

FOR nearly a decade, Netflix has been trying to crack film awards season, with mostly mixed results. Lavish productions such as Roma, The Irishman and The Power of the Dog were all warmly received by the industry, but despite prolific spending – rumoured to have exceeded $100million three years ago, although the company disputes that – the holy grail, a Best Picture Oscar, has thus remained beyond its grasp.

Now it looks as if the streaming giant might have finally found an awardwinning juggernaut, apparently without realising it had it in the first place. In yesterday’s Bafta nominations, Netflix’s German-language adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front was shortlisted in 14 categories, including Best Film. Not only does this make Edward Berger’s First World War epic the most nominated film of the 2023 crop, it also gives it the best tally of Bafta nominations of any film not made in English since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2001, and the most of any film in any language since The King’s Speech in 2010.

This groundswell of acclaim – which may well be mirrored in next Tuesday’s Oscar announcement – appears to have caught the streamer completely off-guard.

Netflix’s own campaigning since last year’s autumn festivals suggested its hopes for the current cycle were built on four films: Rian Johnson’s all-star murder-mystery Glass Onion, Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe biopic

Blonde, Noah Baumbach’s Don Delillo adaptation White Noise, and the Fellini-esque fantasia Bardo, from Alejandro González Iñárritu. But among Bafta voters, this quartet mustered a not-so-grand total of one mention between them: for Blonde’s

Ana De Armas, in Leading Actress.

All Quiet on the Western Front,

however, hoovered up votes almost everywhere it was eligible. This magnificently mounted period piece was always going to excel in the craft and technical categories.

But breaking into the top tier – nods for Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor for Albrecht Schuch, and most notably Best Director for Berger, slotting him above Steven Spielberg in Bafta’s estimations – shows the sheer depth of support it has among the membership at large. The film is enormously deserving of such acclaim, and it’s a thrill to imagine a wider audience now discovering it on Netflix. But from whence did the acclaim come bubbling up? I suspect it might be linked to the overhaul in Bafta’s voting processes, introduced in 2020.

Essentially, members were now each obliged to watch 10 films randomly selected from the entire pool of eligible titles in addition to the ones of their choosing: the idea was to help rebalance the field in terms of ethnicity and sex, by ensuring that attention didn’t automatically cluster around the biggest Hollywood productions. But there was another unintended consequence: deserving films that hadn’t necessarily been framed as “awards movies” were now much more widely viewed and considered than in previous years.

Bafta has always been more warmly disposed towards Netflix than its Hollywood counterpart. Roma and The Power of the Dog both won Best Film here, but were beaten respectively by Green Book and CODA at the Academy Awards. With the benefit of hindsight, you’d have to say the UK’S taste holds up rather better. But is Bafta out on a limb this time too, or just the vanguard? Time will tell.