Oscars on demand: will the Academy be able to put the streaming genie back in the bottle?
‘What about the Oscars?” might not be the question at the top of your mind as you consider the manifold uncertainties raised by the coronavirus pandemic. A Hollywood awards ceremony scheduled for the end of February 2021, one might think, has fewer immediate concerns than most cultural institutions do right now. Yet panic has been rising within the Academy: the show itself may go on, but with cinemas closed for the foreseeable future and dozens of major titles either rescheduling or indefinitely delaying their release dates, will it have have enough standout films to celebrate?
For some weeks now, the joke around the industry has been that Leigh Whannell’s hit psychothriller The Invisible Man – one of the few popular and critical successes to be released in the year’s early months – may as well collect its gongs now. But a crucial rule change announced on Tuesday by Academy CEO Dawn Hudson and president David Rubin has ensured that it will face some competition after all, even if its rivals never see the inside of a cinema.
For the first (and, they claim, only) time, the Oscars are lifting anti-streaming rules, granting eligibility to “films that had a previously planned theatrical release but are initially made available on a commercial streaming or VOD service” – as long as they’re put on a members-only streaming site within 60 days of their digital release.
It’s a change that ensures a film such as Eliza Hittman’s acclaimed, festival-feted abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always still has a shot at Oscar glory. Having had its scheduled cinema release scrapped by the lockdown in March, the film’s distributors opted to release it straight to VOD: a switch that in other years would have rendered it ineligible because the Academy required films under consideration to have a one-week theatrical run in Los Angeles county.
It’s a condition that famously forced Netflix to release prestige Oscar hopefuls including Roma and The Irishman in cinemas, though Academy members have shown resistance to their streaming overlords. Vocally led by such champions of the theatrical experience as Steven Spielberg, anti-Netflix sentiment in their ranks was thought to be a significant factor in Roma’s contentious best picture loss last year, not to mention The Irishman’s zero-for-10 wipeout at this year’s ceremony.
Now more conservative voters will have to adapt and accept online releases as, to haul out a ubiquitous phrase these days, a new normal. Even when cinemas do reopen, the Academy will have to adjust its restrictions. With the pileup of postponed films likely to exceed screen availability, Oscar-qualifying releases will need to be extended to include cities other than Los Angeles.
Hudson and Rubin were quick to stress that the new streaming rule is a one-time-only change, made to accommodate the extraordinary circumstances of Covid-19. Still, at a time when the future of the cinema-release model is in doubt – with Universal having bluntly announced that the premiumVOD release approach it took with Trolls: World Tour will continue to be its strategy when cinemas reopen – many in the industry are wondering if this is a genie the Academy can put back in the bottle.
For now, voters can cling to some sense of tradition. The stipulation that films under consideration must have had a previously planned theatrical release still eliminates direct-to-Netflix fodder such as, say, To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You from contention. It raises more of a question mark in the case of, say, the buzzy Hugh Jackman film Bad Education, which premiered as a theatrical feature at Toronto last year but was repurposed for TV when it was acquired by HBO. That renders it ineligible for the Oscars even under the Academy’s new rule, but the distinction is now a nominal one: surely it’s only a matter of time before younger members ask what a theatrical release even means any more. As it stands, it took a global pandemic to finally accelerate a conversation that has been pressing on the Oscars for years.