Last month’s Academy Awards almost marked the beginning of a new era in movie history. Having changed film and television viewing forever, Netflix had just one world left to conquer: The Oscars. To that end, the streaming giant put the full weight of its considerable marketing budget behind its inaugural Best Picture nominee, Roma, the black-and-white epic by Mexican auteur Alfonso Cuarón. When the ceremony arrived earlier this month, the film was the betting-odds favorite.

Netflix and Cuarón ultimately lost the top prize to Green Book, a movie about an Italian-American’s journey to becoming slightly less racist while driving through the segregated South. But this was just a temporary setback for perhaps the most important media-distribution company in history (and Cuarón still took home two statuettes). Netflix has spent billions doing everything it can to monopolize its users’ time. A Best Picture Oscar, which would lend the company prestige and help it attract more A-list talent, seems like an inevitability. Unless Hollywood changes the rules.



At the next meeting of the Academy’s Board of Governors, director Steven Spielberg is expected to propose that streaming services be blocked from the competition. This issue has divided Hollywood: between an old guard that believes it is protecting both filmmaking and filmgoing from the existential threat of digital disruption, and those who see Netflix as a disruptive and egalitarian force. This is a false dichotomy. The debate about the future of moviegoing shouldn’t be a binary one between a studio system increasingly beholden to franchises and intellectual property, and a nihilistic streaming service set on eliminating all competitors and monopolizing its users’ attention. The real problem with film right now is a lack of diversity caused by a lack of competition—both in Hollywood and online.

Spielberg, who reportedly lobbied Oscar voters on behalf of Green Book, has mused on this subject in the past, arguing that Netflix should be relegated to the Emmys because its movies are typically watched on television sets. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” Spielberg told ITV last March. “You certainly, if it’s a good show, deserve an Emmy, but not an Oscar. I don’t believe films that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination.”

While there’s no reason to question Spielberg’s cinephilic motives, it’s nevertheless clear that Hollywood’s anxiety about Netflix comes down to money. The studios are upset that Netflix does the bare minimum to compete for awards by releasing movies in theaters for the shortest duration possible, then spends tens of millions on awards-driven promotional campaigns; studio executives griped that Netflix “was trying to buy” a Best Picture Oscar for Roma. Above all, though, studios and theater chains see Netflix as a threat to their business model, which is based on people paying increasingly large sums of money to watch movies on large screens outside of their homes. The problem with Netflix, in other words, isn’t that it doesn’t make movies, which it clearly does, but that it allows people to pay $12 to see as many movies as they want in a month rather than $12 to see a single film once.

