Ricky Gervais joked at this year’s Golden Globes that the whole evening should just be him “coming out, going ‘Well done, Netflix, you win. Everything. Good night.’” Perhaps this wasn’t as hyperbolized as it seemed. This year, Netflix became the first streaming service to have the most Oscar nominations.
The exact number is more than impressive – 24, and it’s not only 9 more than last year, but the nominations are also distributed between more films, unlike in 2019 when they were predominantly for Roma. And it’s not just the quantity of the nominations, but also their “quality,” so to speak, their significance. Netflix has not one, but two films nominated for Best Picture – The Irishman and Marriage Story, tieing up with Disney – Ford v Ferrari and Jojo Rabbit, and Sony – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Little Women.
The Irishman is responsible for 10 of Netflix’s nominations. Besides for Best Picture, Scorsese’s gangster drama is nominated in the categories of adapted screenplay, director, cinematography, film editing, production design, and more.
6 of Netflix’s Oscar nominations are attributed to Marriage Story, with three of them being for actors, and one for original screenplay, original music score, and best film, as mentioned above.
Netflix also has not one, but two contenders in the Best Animated Feature category in Klaus and I Lost My Body, surpassing the leader in animation Disney which has only one contender in this race.
Netflix dominates yet another prominent category – Best Documentary Feature – with its two nominees in American Factory and The Edge of Democracy.
Finally, the streaming service earned a nomination for Life Overtakes Me in the Best Documentary Short category.
If that didn’t make a resounding enough of a statement, let’s not forget that it was Paramount Pictures that was originally meant to release The Irishman, the same studio that’s behind most of Scorsese’s biggest films from the last decade. But when the studio decided they didn’t want to invest so much in a film whose cast were the stars of a previous generation, Netflix swooped in and made history.
