Streaming Services Positioned For A Big Oscar Night: We Handicap The Contenders

HBO Max’s Dune grabbed 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and is one of several streaming services with serious contenders for statues at Sunday’s awards.

It's finally almost here, the Streaming Oscars 2022, er, the 94th Oscars ceremony, featuring a trio of funny women as hosts and a LOT of streaming-first projects. Like last year, the festivities have been delayed by the pandemic's depredations and, even more than last year, the awards will feature streaming-connected nominees in just about every category. We're taking a last lingering look at the Oscar chances for the nominees with streaming heritage, and handicapping their chances of scoring a Little Gold Man. 

This year's nominees mark the broadest array of streaming-driven nominees ever, in part because of the pandemic's devastating impacts on theater-going, which forced traditional Hollywood companies to rethink strategies (just three years ago, Disney Pixar’s Encanto, one of the Animated Feature favorites, would have been perched in theaters for months before going to home entertainment). It's also worth noting that even streaming-only companies – Apple, Netflix, Amazon – gave exclusive if generally brief theatrical runs to qualify their projects for Oscar consideration before heading to their forever home online. 

But 2021 also was the first full year of operations for many major streaming services, or at least the year that production pipelines and release strategies began aligning with the new realities of the streaming era. At this point, it's going to be difficult for the Academy's fustier old-school contingent to fully stuff the streaming genie back in the bottle and depend on theatrical-only releases. 

The reality is, it'll probably be years before theaters and studios can count on the return of the older, critic-driven audiences who fuel most Oscar contenders’ success. Only a handful of genres – superheroes, horror, big action movies – proved able to bring in big audiences in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. None of those genres tend to do well in Oscars (other than technical categories such as Visual Effects or Production Design).

That bifurcation seems unlikely to change soon, The longer it lasts, the bigger the shift in release strategies for many smaller films toward more nuanced strategies, perhaps seasoning an online debut alongside or very soon after a traditional platformed theatrical release. This shift could escalate in coming years if those award-focused audiences continue to stay home in front of their 65-inch screens, and even more so if, say, Apple makes the rumors true and buys A24 or some other indie distributor as a sort of high-end riposte to Amazon’s $8.5 billion MGM acquisition, which just closed.

Netflix alone has 10 films of varying lengths with at least one nomination this year, including Best Picture favorite The Power of the Dog, International Feature contender The Hand of God, and Feature Animation co-favorite The Mitchells vs. The Machines. That list also includes multiple projects in less prominent categories, including three of the five Documentary Short nominees: Three Songs for Benazir, set in Afghanistan; Lead Me Home, about homeless people on the West Coast; and Audible, about a deaf football player contending with a friend’s suicide; and Animated Short nominee Robin Robin. Given that lineup – plus lesser contenders The Lost Daughter, tick, tick…BOOM!, and Don’t Look Up – and the Big Red N almost certainly will have plenty to brag about Monday morning.

Several other streamers also appear poised to grab bragging rights Sunday night. In some cases, these 2022 contenders spent time in traditional theatrical release, but almost certainly were watched by far more people online, including even the more than 9,000 Oscar voters. How that impacts voting will be difficult to determine, especially as the Motion Picture Academy gets more diverse and more international under recent expansion drives. Below are movie-by-movie assessments of their chances to win something:

As mentioned, Netflix's The Power of the Dog went into awards season as a heavy favorite to win Best Picture and plenty of other statues, and indeed, its 12 nominations include the top prize, plus director, cinematography, screenplay, and four acting nominations (Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Kody Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons; the latter two are competing against each other). Director Jane Campion is a heavy favorite to pick up her second Oscar (after winning a screenplay award for The Piano almost 30 years ago. Less clear is whether Dog can grab best picture too, given the outcomes of some major precursor awards and the academy’s willingness in recent years to separate the two awards. The film is gorgeous, emotionally chilly, and a decidedly different take on the traditional Western (to the loudly proclaimed distaste of Sacramento-born cowboy actor Sam Elliott). So, cinematographer Ari Wegner will likely join Campion on the dais, and editor Peter Sciberras, the score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenway, and Campion’s adapted screenplay could win too. Dunst has a shot in the hugely competitive supporting actress category, while Cumberbatch's fine but nasty performance of a cowboy who isn't all that he seems won't win the sympathy vote but still might beat out tough competition. 

HBO Max's Dune collected its own mega-batch of nominations, 10, mostly for its many behind-the-camera marvels, from visual effects to sound, production design to makeup and hairstyling. Thanks to its extraordinary immersion in Frank Herbert’s beloved novel, it’s almost certain to convert many of those nominations, but not best picture, making it likely one of the night’s most honored films. And yes, it's true that the film debuted in theaters the same day it hit HBO Max, but consider any Oscars it scoops up as a partial validation of outgoing WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar's hugely controversial yet vital decision to go day-and-date with theatrical and streaming for the entire 2021 Warner Bros. slate. It likely was a lifesaver for some struggling theaters desperate for product. And it also ensured those movies got seen by millions of people on their home screens, while boosting the perceived consumer value of HBO Max despite its confusing launch and relatively high price. That was a critical decision.

Apple paid a record $25 million for CODA after the Sundance darling picked up four awards there, and has since repeatedly come back to it in marketing and advertising for Apple TV Plus. The heart-tugging film itself is built on a set of largely conventional storytelling bones, but won people over with its extra twist portraying the challenges of a deaf family with a hearing-enabled teen daughter trying to find her own way in life. Troy Kotsur, who played the father, seems increasingly a lock for the Best Supporting Actor nomination. It would be a first for a deaf actor in the category, and that can only help Kotsur's prospects, given the feel-good opportunity for voters to back his excellent work. After crucial wins at the Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild awards, the film is now seen as, at the very least, a dark-horse candidate to upset The Power of the Dog for Best Picture. Given the come-from-nowhere Best Picture wins of previous feel-good contenders such as Green Book, CODA may strike a winning note. 

Disney’s Steven Spielberg remake of West Side Story, refreshing a much-loved Broadway musical and 1961 Best Picture Oscar winner, with considerable verve picked up seven nominations and is much loved in certain circles. It stiffed in its theatrical release ($75 million worldwide gross) before finding a second life on Disney Plus, and helping Ariana Debose break through. She’ll likely grab the best supporting actress statue in a very competitive field.

The Mouse House appears better set with its Animated Feature favorite, Encanto, which might also scoop the Oscars for score and original song, Dos Oruguitas. The latter is a lovely song, but it’s worth pondering whether Disney bet on the wrong horse here. We Don’t Talk About Bruno blew up huge on TikTok and beyond, and seemingly has become far more popular, but it didn’t get the nomination. Encanto’s big competition is Netflix’s kinetic, social-media-savvy critique of tech, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, an early pick to win here before Encanto became a cultural breakthrough with its music, looks and lovely Latinx storyline. Also from Disney’s animation operations, Raya and the Last Dragon and Luca each also picked up a Feature Animation nod, but neither seems likely to win.

Hulu’s Flee also received a Feature Animation nomination, but in a historic triple, received nominations in the International Feature and Feature Documentary categories. That says a lot about Academy members’ regard for the extraordinary true story of an Afghani refugee, but it may spread the film’s awards prospects too thinly to actually win.

Flee’s biggest competition might come from another Hulu project, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s loving reclamation of 50-year-old recordings of a Harlem music festival, Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Summer has picked up a lot of the precursor honors and critics awards, so perhaps has an inside track.

HBO Max’s King Richard is dominated by Will Smith's showy portrayal of Richard Williams, the stubborn, domineering father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams. Given Smith is nominated for a third time, and has made a lot of money for a lot of people in Hollywood over the years with his movies, TV shows, and music, he likely has an edge in goodwill among voters too. Consider it a coin flip with Cumberbatch and maybe the next entry. Aunjanue Ellis picked up a best supporting actress nomination for her subtle and strong performance as the mother of the clan, but her category might be the most difficult to pick of any. 

Apple's The Tragedy of MacBeth is a brisk and bleak telling of Shakespeare's great tragedy, shot in black & white and directed by Joel Coen, half the multiple Oscar-winning brother pair. Denzel Washington picked up his ninth Oscar nomination (with two wins), and always has to be taken seriously in an Oscar campaign, so put him in play, but as a longer shot than Smith. The gorgeous cinematography and production face stout competition, but haven’t been stacking up enough precursor wins to look likely to break through.

Amazon's Being the Ricardos has three acting nominations (Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman, and J.K. Simmons) for Aaron Sorkin's talky (of course) take on a pivotal week in the lives of Lucille Ball and her equally transformative husband, Desi Arnaz. It's hard to put much money on any of these horses, given the competition. But if you're interested in the broader story of how Ball and Arnaz helped create the modern television industry, check out Lucy and Desi, Amazon’s splendid documentary directed by Amy Poehler with significant contributions and archival material from the Arnaz-Ball family. It fills in all the revolutionary details Sorkin’s script could only mention in passing.

Netflix’s The Lost Daughter received nominations for lead and supporting actress, and two-time winner Olivia Colman is always a contender, with yet another fine performance in this reverie of a bad mother feeling regret years later, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Jessie Buckley faces that loaded supporting actress gauntlet, so probably should be considered less likely. Perhaps adapted screenplay, by Gyllenhaal, is where Oscar voters try to recognize the film, as often seems to happen with smart, highly personal projects that can’t quite grab the very biggest prizes. The same instinct might give the highly polarizing Netflix satire Don’t Look Up a chance in the original screenplay category.

Disney's(?) tick tick...Boom! nabbed a lead actor nomination for Andrew Garfield's dynamic performance as the tortured creative mind behind one of Broadway's all-time greatest hits, Rent, as he worked and workshopped the autobiographical project that proceeded it. It’s a fine piece of work, and Oscar voters love nothing more than backing stories about themselves (see also, Paolo Sorrentino’s substantially autobiographical The Hand of God, Netflix’s International Feature entry). But Garfield almost certainly will have to watch as WIll Smith or maybe Cumberbatch or Denzel stride to the stage.