It should have been Maestro’s night. It is hard to envision a film more Oscar-friendly than Bradley Cooper’s exploration of the life and loves of famed conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein.
It was a prestige biopic, a longtime route to acting trophies and more (see Darkest Hour, Lincoln, and Milk). The film was a music biopic, a subgenre with an even richer history of award-winning films such as Ray, Walk the Line and Bohemian Rhapsody. What is more, it was the passion project of cowriter, producer, director and actor Bradley Cooper.
That is the kind of multitasking
-for-his-art overachievement that Oscar voters loved to reward actor-turned-directors for pulling off such as Robert Redford, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson.
However, it was not to be. The snub reminded Netflix yet again that no matter how much money it shells out, it cannot buy the respectability it desires from Hollywood.
Though it landed an impressive seven nominations, Maestro did not win a single award. It joins such head-scratching returns as The Irishman (10 nominations, zero wins), Marriage Story (six nominations, one win), The Trial of the Chicago 7 (six nominations, zero wins) and this year’s May December (which lost its only nomination).
All were rapturously reviewed releases from big-name directors, seemingly snubbed or short-shrifted for the one common trait they shared: They were produced as Netflix original films.
They must read like a list of missed opportunities for the company, which has always wanted to be more. Launched and established as a wildly successful DVD-by-mail company (with the implicit goal of putting brick-and-mortar video stores like Blockbuster out of business, which it ultimately did), it supplemented and then supplanted that business model with online streaming.
However, it was not enough to merely provide viewers with TV shows and movies to watch at home; it wanted to create those shows and movies itself, building the closest thing to a self-sufficient production and distribution machine since the US Supreme Court deemed such structures monopolies in 1948.
So, it began spending — fistfuls of cash on wildest-dreams offers to TV hitmakers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, and cinematic auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion and David Fincher.
Netflix was willing to write big checks for anything those directors wanted to make. For many, that meant a greenlight for projects they had been shopping to the traditional studios without luck for years (like Scorsese’s The Irishman and Fincher’s Mank).
This resembles the model adopted in the 1980s by Cannon Films, the purveyors of schlock, which attempted to buy respectability by using profits made from Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson films to bankroll auteurist works by arthouse darlings like Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes.
For Netflix, the gold ring has long been the Oscar — specifically the Best Picture trophy, which has eluded the company for several years despite several worthy productions. Its pursuit of the little gold man is best evidenced by its elaborate awards campaigns.
Even among the big spenders of awards season, the company is notorious among awards-giving voters, who are sent massive coffee table books, movie-branded gifts of food and drink, clothing, pillows and other swag.
The cost of such campaigns is not made public, but the spending is conspicuous enough to stick out. A Variety piece from 2019 estimates Netflix’s campaign for Roma cost US$25 million.
For Maestro, it pulled out all the stops: In addition to the usual gift boxes (which included a Snoopy stuffed animal, custom art, a giant coffee table book and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot), the streamer custom-installed Dolby Digital sound at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall expressly and only for the New York Film Festival premiere.
Whatever the costs of such flourishes, it was a lot of money spent to just walk away with a single trophy for best short film, for Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
That money, of course, has to come from somewhere. In Netflix’s case, it appears to come out of the budget for licensing existing movies to stream to their subscribers, which is what made many of us subscribers in the first place. However, what are people actually watching, from day to day, on the service?
Both Maestro and May December barely made a dent in the Netflix daily top 10; the titles with staying power are conventional theatrical releases like Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, The Super Mario Bros Movie, The Equalizer 3 and the Despicable Me series (which recently took up four of the 10 slots, for two consecutive weeks).
The simultaneous stalling (if not conclusions) of the silver age of streaming TV and superhero movies could harken back to a time when people just wanted to watch well-made, modest entertainment at home.
Netflix, still far and away the streamer with the most subscribers, is uniquely suited to provide that service.
Since Netflix — thanks to its outsider status and the specifics of its release model — is by design a “disrupter,” it will never be accepted by the establishment, and there is nothing that signifies the establishment in Hollywood as succinctly as the Academy Awards. The aforementioned Cannon Films went under when they abandoned their initial, successful business model.
In their case, cheap but profitable exploitation films, which they jettisoned in favor of bigger-budget properties that turned into black holes of spending. In other words, they went out of business by not just sticking with what they did best. Netflix would be wise to avoid making the same mistake.
Jason Bailey is a film critic and historian whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, The Playlist, Slate and Rolling Stone. He is the author, most recently, of Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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