Guardian - 21 January 2018, 10:00 (+ 2289 days 11 hours and 57 minutes) Movies & TV
The success of Mudbound and a string of fine documentaries must surely convince the Academy that the streaming giant deserves a little loveOscar nominations are unveiled next week, and away from the fluffier speculation over who will win what, many in the industry will be perusing the list with a longer-term question in mind: will this be the year that Netflix finally breaks through? The streaming giant has been buzzing around the awards race for a couple of years now, though the Academy has hitherto mostly swatted it away – loth to give its blessing to films uploaded directly online, give or take a minor cinema release for the sake of form. Two years ago, their complete shut-out of Beasts of No Nation – Netflix’s first narrative original, scooped fresh from an acclaimed festival run – seemed a pointed vote in favour of traditional distribution models, notwithstanding the film’s recognition from Bafta and assorted industry guilds.Several fine Netflix documentaries (The Square, Virunga, Winter on Fire, What Happened, Miss Simone?, Ava DuVernay’s 13th) have broken past the old-school bias. It stands to reason that members of the Academy’s doc branch, hip to the challenges of getting audiences to see their movies at all, are less likely to romanticise the big-screen experience. That should continue this year, with Netflix behind four of the 15 films already longlisted for the documentary Oscar: Yance Ford’s superb, politically charged grief memoir Strong Island, previously spotlit in this column; Icarus, Bryan Fogel’s riveting study of sports doping that tumbles dizzyingly into a life-and-death international scandal; Chasing Coral, a slickly persuasive environmentalist call to arms; and One of Us, a sober, absorbing portrait of three Brooklyn Hasidic Jews variously breaking away from their religious community. Continue reading...