The Irishman, by Martin Scorsese ? Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi? 1917 by Sam Mendes ? Who will win the Oscar for best film? As much as the 92 winnerse awards ceremony of the Academy of cinema arts and sciences, Sunday, February 9, in Hollywood (Los Angeles), the film industry will not fail to analyze another performance: that of Netflix. The giant of television on demand, and producer of The Irishman, is under attack by a growing number of competitors, including Disney, which successfully launched its own streaming platform, on November 12, 2019. In three months, Disney + has already attracted 28 million subscribers in the United States, so that Netflix, while maintaining an overwhelming superiority (167 million customers worldwide, including 61 million in the United States), sees its growth plateau.
Netflix has been trying to conquer Hollywood for years. The industry criticizes him for putting cinemas on the straw bypassing conventional distribution channels. In 2019, Reed Hastings' platform won fifteen Oscar nominations (twice as many as in 2018) and won three statuettes for Roma, including that of best director, awarded to Alfonso Cuaron. This year, Netflix can boast of having received 24 nominations, ahead of all Hollywood studios, and even Disney (23 nominations). She aims to finally win the Oscar for best film, for the Italian-Irish saga of Martin Scorsese (10 nominations).
The platform intends to benefit from the renewal of the Academy, rejuvenated, more diverse and less hostile to streaming. She hopes the new members will counterbalance the influence of the purists, who consider the distribution of films "first on the Internet" as an existential danger (and who advise him to knock on the door of the Emmy Awards, the prizes of television professionals). To qualify for the Oscars, the rule is that a film must be shown for at least seven days, and at least three times a day, in a Los Angeles shopping center.
Purchase of historic cinemas
A proposal loaned to Steven Spielberg to make the criteria more stringent was abandoned in the spring of 2019, when the United States Department of Justice warned the Academy against a possible violation of competition laws. Since then, the hatchet has been buried. Netflix even bought a few historic theaters: the Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles and the Paris Theater in New York, as if the "disruptor" was trying to convince him that he had, contrary to appearances, some respect for the tradition.
