2019 Oscars

Roma Nabs Historic Best-Picture Oscar Nomination for Netflix

With Roma’s 10 nominations, plus five in other categories, the streaming service is finally accepted by the film Academy in a big way.
A scene in Roma
Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira both received Oscar nominations in the lead and supporting actress categories, respectively.By Carlos Somonte/Netflix/Everett Collection.

Last March, Participant Media showed potential distributors 10 minutes of Alfonso Cuarón’s newest film Roma, a black-and-white meditation on his childhood from the perspective of one family’s nanny, Cleo, (Yalitza Aparicio) an indigenous woman of Oaxacan descent. The studio had three requirements for its distribution partner: it had to have a global operation; it needed a meaningful theatrical commitment; and it had to treat Roma as something bigger than a black-and-white, foreign-language film.

The company that met all these requirements was Netflix, with which Participant had worked several times, initially with the release of Beasts of No Nation in 2015. “We knew that we were asking Netflix to do something that they hadn’t done before,” said Participant C.E.O. David Linde during a recent interview with Vanity Fair. “We knew going in, and Netflix knew going in, that we were going to approach this [film] differently from the way that they had operated in the past.”

For the first time in the company’s history, Netflix committed to a global theatrical campaign that would open ahead of Roma’s debut on the streaming service. The theatrical release was only three weeks early, which frustrated many large U.S. and international theater chains looking for Netflix to adopt their stringent 90-day theatrical window, but Roma has played on over 900 unique screens around the world in 42 countries, more than any other movie in the streamer’s history. Some theaters also showed a large-format, 70-millimeter print of the film. According to Linde, Roma is currently playing in 12 theaters in Poland, 6 theaters in Israel, and is about to be re-released in Brazil.

“Netflix, and we, and Alfonso worked really, really hard to position the film in the right theaters, in every appropriate location possible, including theaters being renovated in Mexico,” said Linde. “We did come up with a way that was really satisfying to the overall presentation of the movie.”

That theatrical presentation proved to be enough of a commitment to the moviegoing experience to convince members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that the streaming service, and, of course, the movie, were worthy of recognition; voters bestowed the film with 10 Oscar nominations on Tuesday, including Netflix’s first in the best-picture category.

“The movie is about and for people who don’t always have access to great art-house cinema and an amazing 70-millimeter projector,” added Participant’s Jonathan King, president of narrative film and television. “It was important in our conversations that it wasn’t just available to the elite—you know, the people who go to the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival and can afford to go to Lincoln Center—that it was also available to people who [Cuarón] made the movie about and for.”

Not everyone is thrilled with Roma’s nomination domination. AMC Theatres, one of the largest movie-theater chains in the world, issued a statement about its Best Picture Showcase program soon after the nominations were announced, and why Roma won’t be included:

“For more than a decade, movie-lovers have enjoyed the AMC Best Picture Showcase to catch up on the nominated films that played at AMC throughout the prior year. This year, Academy members nominated a film that was never licensed to AMC to play in our theaters. As such, it is not included in the AMC Best Picture Showcase.”

Fortunately for Netflix, theater owners don’t vote on the Oscars. That is for the Academy’s roughly 9,000 members—and Netflix has dedicated more resources than ever to wooing them. (It doesn’t hurt that Netflix is the newest member of the Motion Picture Association of America, a historic move announced Tuesday as the first non-studio to join the trade organization.)

Crucial to Netflix’s strategy was hiring Oscar doyenne Lisa Taback and her team to woo Academy voters about Roma. Taback, the former Weinstein Co. strategist who’s more recently been involved in the best-picture successes of Spotlight and Moonlight, and who also became an Oscar nominee herself this morning with the short documentary film she collaborated on with her daughter, Claire Sliney, called Period. End of Sentence., has been crucial in convincing Academy voters to view Netflix as a positive disruptor to the business, not a negative one.

The streamer also has spent money on expensive television commercials and lavish cocktail parties, and even encouraged Hollywood influencers like Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron to stump for Roma. And the company has needed to. Chief content officer Ted Sarandos wants filmmakers to believe that, in addition to providing them with sweet up-front deals and massive streaming distribution, Netflix also has the capacity to earn them Oscars, too. The streamer may be 22-years old but it has only been interested in the awards business since 2015, when Beasts of No Nation debuted on the service. Since then it has only nabbed two Oscar statuettes: one for the 2016 documentary short The White Helmets, and another for the 2017 feature documentary Icarus.

Cuarón, who’s been through the Oscar dance many times—and nabbed the best-director prize in 2014 for Gravity—knows just how challenging it can be for a film to find its foothold among audiences . . . and Oscar voters. Throughout the season, he’s been called upon to defend the choice to release Roma on Netflix, and he’s done so with enthusiasm.

He became especially heated, though, after he landed two Golden Globe wins earlier this month—for best-foreign-language film and best director—chastising a journalist backstage while holding his two statuettes: “My question to you is: how many theaters did you think that a Mexican film in black and white, in Spanish and Mixteco, that is a drama without stars—how big did you think it would be as a conventional theatrical release?” Cuarón asked. “It was not a cosmetic release . . . the movie opened more than a month ago and is still playing. That is rare for a foreign film . . . Why don’t you take the list of foreign films this year, and compare the theatrical release of those films and for how long they’ve been playing? See how many are playing in 70 [millimeter.]”

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