If you need an example of where Hollywood is right now - of Hollywood's timidity, of its insecurity, of Hollywood as an industry in the midst of an insurgency - you need look no further than the saga around the latest movie from Martin Scorsese.

It's February of this year, and Scorsese, now 74, has just come off the back of his latest film, Silence, and was about to embark on his next. Silence had opened well, last November, yet it had not kept up the pace. From a budget of $40 million, it had recouped just $15m.

In some ways, this was hardly a shock. It was a long-gestating passion project. It was a meditation on faith. It was about two Jesuit priests, the relatively un-starry Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, who travel to Japan to save their master. It was the film Scorsese had waited his life to make. And it was the best part of three hours long. It was a flop.

Still, in normal circumstances, this wasn't too much of a problem. It was, after all, his first box-office failure for almost two decades. Not since 1999's Bringing Out The Dead, starring Nicolas Cage, had he produced a dud. The rest were more than solid; some were spectacular. Gangs Of New York doubled its £100m budget, so did The Aviator. The Departed tripled its $90m budget, so did Shutter Island. It wasn't Avengers money, but it wasn't pocket change either.

Read more: Martin Scorsese's Silence won't be for everyone

Surely, you'd think, a filmmaker of Scorsese's repute was allowed the odd slip-up every now and then? The deal for his next, The Irishman, had already been done, the i's enthusiastically dotted and t's excitedly crossed by Paramount in the wake of The Wolf Of Wall Street's success - a film that, like most of his recent output, was costly at the $100m mark, certainly costly for a film that contained midget-tossing and cocaine rather than superheroes in spandex, but one that had made back some $392m, making it Scorsese's highest-grossing film ever. The budget for The Irishman was around the $100m mark too. Like Silence, it was another passion project of his, one he'd nurtured for years, but one that was much more obviously commercial. It would tell the tale of Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran, a hit man tied to the Bufalino crime family who claimed, on his deathbed, to have been responsible for the murder of teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Robert De Niro was already on board as Frank. Al Pacino was about to sign as Hoffa. Scorsese was trying to coax Joe Pesci out of retirement. All would later be confirmed.

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It was, in short, set to be the most anticipated film not just of Scorsese's career, but one of the most anticipated films of the decade: Scorsese and De Niro reunited for the first time since Casino in 1995, De Niro and Pacino reunited for the first meaningful time since facing off in Heat that same year. An event.

There was just one problem. Paramount no longer wanted to make it.

Read more: Casey Affleck covers the latest issue of British GQ

Silence's failure had casualties, the highest profile of which was Brad Grey, Paramount's CEO, who resigned. Silence wasn't the only reason, but it was the straw that broke Grey's back. Paramount had been poor for years, the bottom of all the major studios in terms of revenue for five years in a row, mostly due to being the last of them still backing director-led films: ones that often garnered acclaim, but were an even split of commercial duds (Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa, Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!!, Scorsese's Silence) and moderate successes (Denzel Washington's Fences, Stephen Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins), with only the occasional breakout hit (Adam McKay's The Big Short, the Oscar-nominated Arrival).

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Grey was, it seems, stuck in the past, and Silence only seemed to prove it. Disney had Marvel and Star Wars; Sony had Bond and The Da Vinci Code. Paramount had faith. And so, the only major studio still making big budget bets on talent - notably Christopher Nolan's Interstellar - was about to change course.

As one source from inside Paramount put it, "Scorsese's movie is a risky deal, and Paramount is not in the position to take risks." It put production on hold.

But just when it seemed The Irishman wouldn't be made, that even a Scorsese gangster movie with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino was now too much of a risk for Hollywood, it was rescued. It was bought - worldwide rights and all, for a fee rumoured to be approaching $100m - by Netflix.

The recent Academy Awards were notable for two key moments - Casey Affleck winning the Best Actor Oscar and Moonlight winning Best Picture.

Both were, in different ways, controversial. But both were hugely significant - in terms of where Hollywood is coming from and where it is going.

When Moonlight won, after being nominated for four Baftas - after that mix-up of the wrong envelope read out, after those fingers pointing at what went wrong after La La Land had initially been given it, after the accountancy firm behind it was fired for getting its one job wrong - it was seen as a triumph for a fusty Hollywood that was finally (finally!) changing with the times. After all, La La Land was the obvious choice: a feel-good, throw-back, headache-bright musical with two genuine stars (Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling), it seemed certain to follow Birdman (won in 2015), Argo (2013) and The Artist (2012) to make it four times in six years that the Academy had given their highest prize to a film about Hollywood itself.

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Except, instead, they gave it to an intimate, slow-burn indie film that charted three ages of a young black man, one coming to terms with - or maybe just coping with - his homosexuality. It was the first Best Picture winner with an exclusively black cast, the first with a homosexual lead role, the least widely seen (with a $22m domestic gross) since The Hurt Locker, the least expensive (with a $1.5m budget) since Rocky. It was a miracle it was even nominated.

There were, as you'd expect with a film winning in such unusual circumstances, the usual conspiracy theories from bedroom Reddit detectives - it was Leonardo DiCaprio's fault! It was Trump's revenge against Jimmy Kimmel! It was a play for ratings! It was Russia! - but the truth was more mundane, and all the more heartening. The Oscars really did seem to be changing. While the last count shows that the Academy voters, made up mostly of old industry hands, as wildly out of touch - 91 per cent white, 76 per cent male, an average age of 63, our culture ranked by everyone who voted for Brexit - they had made an effort in recent years to invite younger, more diverse, members.

© Dale Robinette/Black Label Media/REX/Shutterstock

Read more: La La Land is the feel-good film we all need right now

But most remarkable was that Trump likely did play a part - just not in the way the conspiracy theorists imagined. La La Land - an escapist fantasy - clocked up its 14 nominations before Trump assumed the presidency. When he did, ahead of liberal Hollywood's preferred choice of Hillary Clinton, that escapism started to seem cheap. When the final round of Oscars voting began, on 13 February, it was less than a month since Trump had assumed office and less than a fortnight since he had introduced his first travel ban. To be sure, Moonlight deserved the prize on its own merits. But it's easy to imagine how floating voters were swayed between the two. Just as voting for the former started to feel like a retreat, a final act of a self-obsessed Hollywood burying its collective head in the sand, so voting for the latter - the year after so few people of colour were nominated it spawned the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite - had now become a statement of intent.

Yet the biggest shift was one rarely reported on, one just under the surface: how did Moonlight get made in the first place?

And the answer to that is similar to the answer to how Martin Scorsese's latest film finally got made.

Moonlight was funded, partly, by Amazon.

Read more: The Moonlight men win at modelling too

It's hardly news that Hollywood has changed course in the last decade or so. When the global financial crisis of 2008 hit, it made law what was already custom: why back originality and talent (risky, unpredictable) when you can back projects based on name recognition? No shots were fired, but the marketing department performed a silent coup. This is how we end up with films based on toys (Transformers, GI Joe), board games (Battleship, the forthcoming Monopoly) and emojis (The Emoji Movie is coming out later this year; Patrick Stewart is voicing the steaming pile of poop emoji. Do your own jokes). A Marvel superhero film isn't so much a film as the next episode in a series you're already watching - albeit one that plays on the big screen. A Star Wars film isn't so much a film as a brand extension - albeit one with lightsabers. A film such as La La Land becomes the exception to the rule only because it can answer the crucial question: why watch this in the cinema? For an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular in which, at one point, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling fly, the answer is obvious. For Moonlight, less so.

Moonlight was made by A24, an upstart Hollywood studio that isn't your average upstart Hollywood studio, in the sense that it's not in Hollywood.

Instead, its offices are on the top floor of an imposing prewar 12-storey building at 31 West 27th Street, in the NoMad district of New York. In February this year, however, it was all but deserted, as the entire staff decamped for Hollywood. The nascent company, formed just five years before, was in the running for eight Oscars. When Moonlight, the first film it funded from inception, won Best Picture, the staff danced wildly into the small hours to Rihanna's "We Found Love". The resonance of the lyrics did not need explaining: take your pick from the film's remarkable rise, the sheer unlikeliness of its existence, or the way in which it won: "We found love in a hopeless place".

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A24 is not the first small studio with the bright idea that, as Hollywood has given up on making films for adults, it's going to start. The death of the "mini-majors" in the last few years - off-shoots of the larger studios such as Fox Searchlight and Warner Independent that specialised in making films about humans without superpowers - has created a gold rush, new companies popping up by the month, each with their own scheme to moneyball the greenlighting process or disrupt... something or other.

There's Annapurna (The Master, Zero Dark Thirty, Her, American Hustle), the company set up five years ago by billionaire heiress Megan Ellison while still in her twenties, which funds all the auteurs (Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Kathryn Bigelow) who now struggle to get their mid-budget films made. It mostly loses money. There's STX (The Circle, The Gift, the forthcoming Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets starring Cara Delevingne), set up three years ago, which also aims to fund/revive those missing middle-budget films, but decided the ones guaranteed to succeed were ones that placed known stars in obvious settings (Russell Crowe in Robin Hood: yes. Russell Crowe in The Water Diviner: no). It mostly makes money.

Most recently, Imperative Entertainment - a company set up by a Houston-based entrepreneur who made his money in the automotive industry - caused a stir by winning the bidding rights to New Yorker writer David Grann's hotly tipped Killers Of The Flower Moon, about a group of mysterious murders of oil-rich native Americans in the Twenties and the birth of the FBI, beating everyone from Sony (which had partnered with George Clooney), to Regency (which had partnered with Brad Pitt), to Paramount (teamed with JJ Abrams to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star). Deadline called it "a stunning end to the biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory".

It and others aim to fill a gap, but mostly do it in familiar ways: it buys films that screen at festivals or funds its own from scratch. It takes a gamble on how many cinemas to open in and it hopes that it's right.

A24 does that too, but has also fundamentally changed the way Hollywood works. In 2013, a year after it formed, it signed two significant deals. One was with DirecTV, the other was with Amazon. The former took the unprecedented step of making its releases available for video-on-demand at home for 30 days before the cinema release and the latter meant all of its films would appear on the Amazon Prime streaming service once the cinema release was over. In a stroke, it all but eliminated the risk of the film business. Even if a film didn't catch fire in the cinema, if it was good, it would make money either side. It could have a long tail. It could go viral. Ever since, it has churned out films that have seen it become the envy of the industry, making every great daring film that Hollywood no longer touches, from Jonathan Glazer's majestic sci-fi Under The Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson, to Locke, a film that sees Tom Hardy speaking on his car's hands-free for an hour and a half (trust us, it's good) to The Lobster, a brilliantly surreal high-concept take on dating.

Read more: Ex Machina is the best British sci-fi film since Moon

The year before A24 struck gold with Moonlight, it notched up its first Best Picture Oscar nomination with Room, while scoring wins for Best Actress (Brie Larson for the same film), Best Visual Effects (for Ex Machina) and Best Documentary Feature (for Amy). It was the only studio to have three separate films win awards and took home more Oscars than any studio apart from Fox or Warner Bros.

When Moonlight director Barry Jenkins had his first meeting with A24 co-founder Daniel Katz, chatting over a sushi lunch, and said he planned to use three different actors for the lead role in Moonlight, none of them famous, he expected some pushback, but got none whatsoever. It simply backed the film.

And yet, for everyone who rejoiced that Moonlight's victory was a victory for cinema in general, a victory for taking risks and telling a tale that was intimate and human and true - a film, finally, that allowed Hollywood to feel good about itself - the truth was far more complicated, and a little bit embarrassing. It only came about because of TV.

When Casey Affleck collected the Best Actor Oscar for his role in Kenneth Lonergan's beautifully sad paean to grief, Manchester By The Sea, about a father who loses his daughters in a house fire, it made headlines for more than one reason. The first was that an actor being awarded the highest prize in the industry was under a cloud of sexual abuse allegations. Affleck, it is alleged, terrorised female colleagues while filming 2010 mockumentary I'm Still Here. He allegedly insisted one employee, producer Amanda White, share his hotel room, and bombarded her with abusive messages when she refused. Another woman, cinematographer Magdalena Gorka, alleged that she woke up in a hotel room only to find Affleck "curled up next to her in bed wearing only his underwear and a T-shirt". Both cases were settled out of court. Affleck has maintained his innocence. While most clapped when Affleck went up to accept his award, Brie Larson, the presenter of the award, pointedly did not. She later said her actions "spoke for itself".

When we talk about change in Hollywood, it's tempting to see this as an example as some things staying exactly the same. The male lead whose star power make them untouchable. And yet, it's just possible that might be changing too.

The other headline-grabbing part of Affleck's win was the studio behind it: it marked the third of the first three Oscars ever won by Amazon Studios, the retailer's increasingly influential film division (*Manchester By The Sea *also won Best Original Screenplay, while Amazon picked up Best Foreign Language film for The Salesman). As with Netflix picking up Scorsese's latest shows, it was only a matter of time.

Affleck's Best Actor Oscar made headlines for more than one reason

Read more: Watch the trailer for Netflix's Brad Pitt-starring War Machine

At the most recent Cannes and Sundance festivals, for instance, it wasn't the major studios picking up the hot properties, but a turf war between Netflix and Amazon. Netflix cut deals for the new films starring Brad Pitt (War Machine), Angelia Jolie (First They Killed My Father) and Will Smith (Bright), paying some $60m for War Machine alone. All will forgo cinema releases, and will launch directly online. Amazon - which is taking a different tack by hoovering up art-house luminaries such as Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Nicolas Winding Refn and Mike Leigh - will give its films a cinema run before making them available on Amazon Prime.

Just as Hollywood now has to ask itself, "Why watch this in the cinema?", and so finds itself answering with events rather than films, movies too big to miss, Netflix and Amazon find they can do the opposite. They can mop up the big films to give you another reason to sign up (who wouldn't pay to see Scorsese directing a gangster film?) and also take bets on smaller projects - giving them a potential audience of millions rather than the spare seats in an art-house cinema. For independent films, ones such as Manchester and Moonlight, ones that show small lives are never small to those who live them, there's never been a better time.

Read more: The problem with Logan is he’s invincible

You need no better evidence at how far traditional Hollywood has gone in the other direction - cookie-cutter films meant to appeal to everyone, everywhere, and offend no one along the way - than by looking at the blockbuster releases in March alone. Of the four big films - Logan, Kong: Skull Island, Power Rangers, Ghost In The Shell - three are from Asian origin stories. It's been much noted that over half of an action blockbuster's income now comes from Asia, but the cliché was always that Hollywood was tweaking its films to suit this new audience. The opposite might now be true.

We end in a place where star power has never been less relevant. The superhero blockbuster had already diminished it - the stars don't sell those films, the comic book already has. But what happens to movie stars when films just land online with all the fanfare of a status update, no glitzy premiere in sight and just the online clicks for judgement?

You could argue someone like Casey Affleck will find that imperious shield of star power not as bulletproof as he thought. A star doesn't sell a film as they once might have.

As for Scorsese, Netflix has apparently made a small concession, just for him. As a resolutely old-school auteur, Scorsese is not a fan of viewing a film anywhere but a cinema.

"The problem now is that it is everything around the frame that is distracting," he said, giving a talk at London's BFI in February. "Now you can see a film on an iPad. You might be able to push it closer to your [face] in your bedroom, just lock the door and look at it if you can, but I do find just glimpsing stuff here or there, even watching a film at home on a big-screen TV, there is still stuff around the room. There's a phone that rings. People go by. It is not the best way."

So for Scorsese, Netflix made an exception to their rule. For a limited time before it goes online for their customers to stream, The Irishman will be in cinemas. DeNiro and Pacino, as God intended.

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