Several fine Netflix documentaries (The Square, Virunga, Winter on Fire, What Happened, Miss Simone?, Ava DuVernay’s 13th) have broken past the old-school bias. It stands to reason that members of the Academy’s doc branch, hip to the challenges of getting audiences to see their movies at all, are less likely to romanticise the big-screen experience. That should continue this year, with Netflix behind four of the 15 films already longlisted for the documentary Oscar: Yance Ford’s superb, politically charged grief memoir Strong Island, previously spotlit in this column; Icarus, Bryan Fogel’s riveting study of sports doping that tumbles dizzyingly into a life-and-death international scandal; Chasing Coral, a slickly persuasive environmentalist call to arms; and One of Us, a sober, absorbing portrait of three Brooklyn Hasidic Jews variously breaking away from their religious community.
Higher up the ladder, all eyes are on Dee Rees’s muscular, expansive southern farm epic Mudbound to become Netflix’s first nominee in the biggest races. Nods for screenplay and supporting actress Mary J Blige seem assured. Rees is angling to become the first black woman, and cinematographer Rachel Morrison the first woman at all, to be nominated in their fields. And if Mudbound makes the best picture lineup – a touch-and-go possibility, according to pundits – it’ll be a first for a film viewed on vastly more laptop screens than silver ones upon release. Even their roundly derided orc-cop thriller Bright could set a precedent: its tacky but elaborate prosthetics rather astonishingly made the Academy’s best makeup shortlist.
Netflix’s rival Amazon has previously cracked the Oscar race by playing nice with an old-fashioned cinema-first release for prestige hopefuls such as Manchester by the Sea. How Mudbound performs this week may tell us just how swiftly the goldrush game is about to change.
If it makes the cut, that’ll buoy the hopes of multiple titles on Netflix’s vastly expanded roster of original films for 2018, among them such seemingly awards-friendly titles as Come Sunday, the fact-based story of a theologically conflicted televangelist played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Directed by Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace), it premieres at Sundance before hitting Netflix in April.
You sense Netflix using such scrappy indies as Oscar-season trial runs before they go supernova on us. By the time they bring us the likes of David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King, a $120m Robert the Bruce epic starring Chris Pine, or Martin Scorsese’s as-yet-unscheduled The Irishman, a gangster saga reuniting De Niro and Pacino, they’ll want their Oscar mojo in full working order.
New to streaming & DVD this week
Mother!
(Paramount, 18)
Scarcely less dementedly exhilarating on Blu-ray than it was in cinemas, Darren Aronofsky’s nightmarish vision of the artist’s ego run amok stands as one of last year’s gutsiest.
Wind River
(Sony, 15)
Layer upon layer of brisk, forbidding wilderness atmosphere carry a more pedestrian murder mystery in Taylor Sheridan’s stern, stylish, Native American reservation-set thriller.
Blue Collar
(Powerhouse, 18)
A 40th-anniversary reissue for Paul Schrader’s sinewy portrait of working lives and union politics in a Detroit car factory, which has held on to its earthy, profane anger.
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