Apple TV Plus’ CODA is the first streaming movie to win Best Picture at the Oscars
With its big win at the 2022 Oscars, Apple TV Plus' CODA did what a slew of Netflix movies could not
Aux News Coda
After a bizarre, eventful, and bizarrely eventful Oscars telecast, the biggest award of the night—Best Picture—was given to one of the favorites from the whole show: director Siân Heder’s Apple TV+ film CODA. In addition to Best Picture, it won Best Adapted Screenplay and awards season star Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor, giving it a perfect record in terms of the categories it was nominated in. Better yet, two of those wins are historically significant, with Kotsur becoming the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar and CODA itself being the first streaming film to win Best Picture at the Oscars—after years of Netflix and Amazon making big plays for the highest honor in Hollywood.
CODA, based on the 2014 French movie La Famille Bélier, is about the daughter (Emilia Jones) of deaf parents (Kotsur and Marlee Matlin) and their lives in the fishing community of Gloucester, Massachusetts. In his review for The A.V. Club last year, Noel Murray noted that it artificially plays up crisis upon crisis for the sake of drama, but when all the pieces come together the emotional beats (which are “telegraphed almost from the beginning”) still “hit hard,” with Murray adding that they end up “effectively leaving viewers who can suspend their disbelief feeling uplifted and dewy-eyed.”
This is also just the latest in impressive history-making accolades for CODA: Last year, it became the first entry in the Sundance Film Festival to win the Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award, the Directing Award, and a Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble. The fact that it landed on Apple TV+, a streaming service, seems incidental. It was pretty much destined for this big moment of show biz glory. (That being said, Netflix boss Ted Sarandos must be fuming about this on the inside, right?)
21 Comments
First streaming movie to win an Oscar. First deaf male to win supporting actor.First comment.
first oscar slap
Ah firsties.We don’t get those much around here anymore. Soon we’ll be asking ourselves yet again “WHERE’S FIREFLY???”
… Firefly died of CancerAids.
CancerAids…OF COCK
CODA played in theaters, too. It just also happened to be on streaming.
this is obviously a comment bought for and paid for by AppleTV, but thank you for reminding us that Don’t Look Up, Power of the Dog, et cet. were also played in theaters.
I remember Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video being first played in a theater to make it eligible for an Oscar.I don’t know if that’s still a rule, but it’s not hard to get around the rule.As films required theatrical screenings to be eligible for Academy Awards, Landis had the video played before screenings of Fantasia (1940) at a Los Angeles cinema, though it was not nominated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson%27s_Thriller_(music_video)
That’s an odd and, IMO, incorrect way to phrase it.Apple bought the rights to distribute the movie after Sundance and the primary way people watched it was on streaming. It made a little over $1m in theaters total as it likely got the exact minimal release needed to qualify for the Academy Awards and nothing more.So it’s more like the movie was on streaming and happened to be in some theaters as well to allow it to compete for Best Picture. I guess if your point was that it wasn’t made by the streaming services directly (like Roma was as an example), that would be fair.
Well, it’s ultimately a (pointless) argument about labelling: is a movie a “streaming movie” if it was mainly watched via streaming and not in theaters? What percentage of people need to see it via streaming vs. theater for it to still be a “streaming” movie? If it had made $10 or $20 or $100 million in theaters, at what point is it no longer a streaming movie? You can see why it’s a pointless argument.I agree that the way I phrased it is kind of inaccurate: it didn’t just happen to be on streaming, it was (apparently) primarily intended to be viewed on streaming, it was just in theaters for Oscar qualification. Sure, fine.
The distinction seems pretty clear to me…there are movies that air exclusively in theaters for a set window before going to home media or streaming as that is how they primarily make money and there are movies that air exclusively on a streaming service and pay a bit of lip service to traditional theaters when they have to do so for awards. CODA is clearly in the latter category.As for whether it’s pointless or not, maybe it is to some moviegoers who aren’t involved in the business of making movies or running theaters. The people who are involved clearly do care – whether it is directors who want their movies shown on a big screen or theaters who see less revenue.
Sure, but there’s been a ton of movies lately that have done well in theaters and also been on streaming at the same time, which thus don’t fall into either category; e.g. WB’s entire (?) 2021 output. And in all three sets, there’s edge cases where a movie was expected to do much better in theaters but then ended up doing much better on streaming; is it now a “streaming movie” because people ended up watching it more on streaming, in contrast to the expectations by the producers? Etc.Yeah, people in the industry definitely have a bigger stake in it, especially since their income is often tied to specific legal terminology. But we’re not those people; the discussion of whether a movie is labelled as “streaming” or not has very different import to us and to them. The fact that it’s the same word is, for all practical purposes, a coincidence.
I think you’re maybe making this a bit overly complicated and it might be partially my fault. I know in my OP I talked about viewership, but really the difference is distribution strategy.I don’t consider the WB slate of movies to be streaming movies because the distribution strategy had been to release them widely in theaters before the pandemic hit and they maintained that theatrical release even after putting the movies on HBO Max too. I don’t consider movies that initially release to theaters but fail and go to streaming earlier as streaming movies either.Streaming movies are movies that are primarily (and potentially only) distributed on a streaming service, movies that eschew the traditional wide-release in theaters. It’s pretty easy to isolate those movies from others which is why they’re called out as such in awards.As for whether it really matters to us, well we’re both debating it so it must matter a little.
Actually, I don’t think it matters to either of us at all how these movies are labelled. It only matters that we win this stupid Internet argument. 😉
Haha pretty much.
It’s a beautiful small and funny film that’s also a very by the numbers underdog film. An odd pick for Best Picture, but a big day for Apple. (Suck it Netflix)
ROMA was a Netflix movie that won, but I guess that was Best International Film and not the main categories.Netflix came very close this year though seeing as they won almost every other Best Picture awards that CODA did not.
There’s also “Soul” which won Best Animated Picture without ever going to theaters.
Troy Kotsur reportedly did quite a bit of improvising with his sign language, making it quite fortunate that Emilia Jones, who didn’t know a word of ASL before taking the role, put in the effort to become fluent so she could play off him.
Soul won Best Animated Feature last year, and was never *once* in theaters. And sure, that’s not “Best Picture” but only because animated films are not given that opportunity much (if at all) these days.
Am I alone in thinking that CODA was absolutely NOT the best picture this year. Almost every film nominated, with the exception of Don’t Look Up, was much more of an artistic achievement. Effective heartstring yanking is only one part of what makes a good film a good film. I was positive that the award was going to The Power of the Dog or Dune.