Who’s really winning the 2021 Oscar?

The 93rd Oscar, after an unprecedented 14-month eligibility season and a pandemic that closed most of the country’s cinemas, will finally be delivered on Sunday, April 25. Just how normal this ceremony will be – and how normal the industry should see it as being – is up for debate: some see it as the steadfast continuation of a tradition that began with Douglas Fairbanks handing Clara Bow the Best Picture in 1927 Wings and it has endured all kinds of national calamities since then, and others like the end of a year like no other. But below both positions – this is the year that the show should continue and this is the year that the show didn’t continue – lurks a little dread about this year’s “Oddscars” – the fear that they might not be so anomalous, after all. Certainly, at some point, things will go back to how they were, right? Doesn’t that have to be true?

No, it doesn’t matter.

The truth is that there is not much argument to be made that this year’s Oscar is a type of shocking break from tradition. The show will not be exactly as it usually is – the awards will be delivered at Union Station in LA and the guest list will be restricted to nominees and their guests. But the hiring of the telecast director with six Oscars Oscars, Glenn Weiss, and the ban on Zoom acceptance speeches (we will see if the latter, which is already generating considerable resistance, remains) are two gestures intended to connect the ceremony of 2021 to its predecessors. Of course, many top-tier studio offerings have been postponed out of the running this year, but no asterisks are needed when it comes to the strong Best Picture nominee list – The father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Nomadland, Promising young woman, Metal sound, and The Chicago Trial 7 – any of whom could have been credibly appointed.

The lack of major studio films this year has led to some welcome premieres. An Asian woman, NomadlandChloé Zhao’s will compete for the best director award, but she will not be the only woman or the only Asian director in the category. Viola Davis became the first black actress to get four career nominations, and Zhao, with four nominations this year alone (for production, direction, writing and editing), becomes the first woman to enter a very short list previously reserved for the likes of Orson Welles and Warren Beatty. But take a step back, and there is nothing overtly unusual in this year’s camp: it includes newbies like Minariit’s Lee Isaac Chung, but also modern masters like David Fincher and system favorites like Aaron Sorkin. And the divide between innovative artists getting their first nominations (there are 11, ranging from Riz Ahmed and Steven Yeun to Andra Day and Vanessa Kirby) and returning vets (Anthony Hopkins back for the sixth time, Glenn Close for the eighth) is quite typical.

But any hope that the 2021 Oscar will mark a return to the usual business for Hollywood in an almost post-COVID and increasingly vaccinated world – one in which cinemas will open their doors and film production will increase – has disappeared March 23 , when Disney announced that their next Marvel movie, Black Widow, was abandoning its planned May 7 release date and its strategy only in theaters; the film will now hit theaters on July 9 and, for a high price, Disney +. The symbolic impact of this decision is immense, since as the Marvel Cinematic Universe progresses, so does the world of mere mortals who go to the theater. Widow was the first giant summer blockbuster to cancel its release (originally scheduled for May 1) when COVID was released, and its eventual return to theaters has long been seen by the industry as the moment when everything can return exactly where it was at the beginning of 2020.

It may be time to stop waiting for that moment. If you suspend the rules long enough, new rules will emerge to take your place – both at the Oscars and in the industry they celebrate. Those in the industry who still insist on seeing these Oscars like a blip – a strange movie with no celebratory events that gained prominence just because the real competitors were eliminated, and a broadcast that is expected to fall to a record low audience, a fate that has befell all the other awards shown this season – are not paying attention. While almost all of this year’s nominees are available to anyone with a TV and the right streaming services, these revanchists complain that almost no one has seen them. (The insistence that these films are culturally invisible is a very old thing in cinema; Hollywood uses recipes to measure impact, and the collective reach of Netflix, Hulu and Prime Video means nothing to the establishment of the studio in the absence of a metric that can be checked every Monday morning.) Talk to these people, and what you hear a lot is: “Wait until next year”. You know, when Warner launches Dune and On the heights and Disney releases West Side Story and critics pass out with Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson and Ridley Scott, 83, doesn’t have one, but two great films and festivals are no longer virtual and December is a crowded mess and everything is the way it always has been and should be. But this year? Nah. This is the sad Oscars, a funeral ceremony for a one-season one-night non-event that is likely to be remembered for the sadness of a Best Actor tribute to Chadwick Boseman, which ended very early in a year in which hundreds of thousands of Americans also died too soon .

The point is that neither the Oscar nor the industry they celebrate has been “normal” for a long time, and they will never come back. If you’re shocked that Netflix has more nominations than any other company, including two Best Picture nominees, you shouldn’t – Netflix had two Best Picture nominees last year too, and one the year before, when there were even murmurs concerned about whether it should be allowed to compete at all. (That one the conversation ended the minute it became apparent that apparently half of the Academy was making films for Netflix.) And the diversity of this year’s lineup – six black actors, two Korean actors, the first Muslim candidate for best actor – is not an anomaly of COVID: it is the reflection of a new, much more diverse Academy, whose voters joined half after 2012, just a few years before a completely white list of acting nominees unleashed the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite and led to an effort of several remarkably successful years to diversify its ranks. Likewise, the dominance of streamers – the two hopes of Netflix’s Best Picture, Chicago 7 and Mank, joined Prime Video’s first competitor Metal sound – It’s normal, the new normal, the one that everyone should get used to. Hybrid release strategies, such as those for Nomadland (a film from Disney’s Searchlight division that was released simultaneously on the Hulu company’s streamer) and Judas and the Black Messiah (a Warner Bros. film that premiered on HBO Max the same day it opened in theaters) may have been specially designed for this year, but that does not mean that the model will never be used again, even if the pandemic becomes a factor no.

Film studios have always feared external threats, whether from television in the 1950s and 1960s, indies in the 1990s and 2000s, or streamers in recent years. These legacy companies have somehow managed to survive, often by co-opting their budding rivals. But this moment is different: as new models are emerging, the old ones really seem to be giving way. Netflix, Amazon and Apple are not courageous oppressed; they are giants, in some cases giant trillions of dollars, that make even the biggest movie studios look like quaint little boutiques. And about these studios: not many are left. Only five from the golden age, two of which, Disney and Warner, made it clear this year that powering their new streaming services, including movies, is their priority. Of the remaining three, NBCUniversal owns the new streaming service Peacock, ready to become home to its films whenever the company decides to do so; Paramount has delivered one film after another to streamers (including Chicago 7) and has just launched its own, Paramount +; and Sony, the only studio without its own streaming arm, is reportedly coming to terms with one of the big ones.

What this means is the first real redefinition of “Hollywood” out of studios in the century since its foundation, and anyone who imagines that the Academy will fight against that to insist on preserving historical norms has not taken a good look at the Academy lately. . Worshiping the past can work very well for AMPAS ‘humble new Death Star museum – a money pit designed by star architects that has been under construction for a decade and is finally scheduled to open in September . But as for Oscar itself, the war is over, and traditionalists – those who believe the Academy’s goal is to celebrate the most successful mass entertainment produced by Hollywood studios – have lost. Most studios don’t even make these films anymore – Warner’s Argo and Universal Green Paper they are the only two direct studio films to win Best Picture in the last 15 years, and even they were anomalies for their companies. But in addition, the Academy’s voters most dedicated to preserving these traditions, those who were the heart and soul of the organization not so long ago, are now a niche – just one among many. This does not mean that they could not support a traditionalist choice (The Chicago Trial 7, a sincere film with a liberal white face, is probably the most similar option to an old-fashioned Oscar winner, and everyone watched it at home, on Netflix), or will never see it again; tastes vary from year to year, as do the options available. But except for Green Paper, voters have not been going that way recently; this Academy seemed to announce its reinvention with an inadvertently impressive flourish three years ago, when Moonlight to knock La La Land in what appeared to be a sudden death extension, and confirmed it last year with a historic victory by Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. This is the new normal, pandemic or not. No wonder everyone is so anxious.