Apple’s Best Picture Oscar Beats Netflix to Streaming’s Most Elusive Prize – CNET [CNET]

Apple‘s CODA won the Academy Award for best picture Sunday, the first time a streaming service has conquered Hollywood’s most coveted film prize. Among streaming services, Netflix was nominated in the category, too, and the two services were considered to be the frontrunners in the category.

Netflix has been mounting its pursuit of a best picture Oscar for years. Since it began making its own programming a decade ago, Netflix notched its first Oscar nomination in 2014 for a documentary feature and won its first Oscar in 2017 for a documentary short. Last year, Netflix was the winningest studio on Oscar night, taking home seven statues, but the award for best picture remained out of reach. 

Apple, on the other hand, is less than three years old and still finding its identity in the noisy competitive field of today’s streaming services. Apple TV Plus was the first to the battle lines in the so-called “streaming wars,” a period when media giants and tech titans launched a flood of new streaming services to take on Netflix. With a multi-billion-dollar budget to rope in some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Apple TV Plus struck out on an unconventional strategy: It invested in big-budget, star-packed prestige originals and basically nothing else. 

“Streaming” movies had a simpler run at the Oscars this year and last. Because the COVID-19 pandemic upended film releases around the globe, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the Oscars, loosened its eligibility rules, making it simpler for streaming-only releases to be nominated. 

But the unprecedented style of releasing movies during the pandemic also blurred the lines of what is a “streaming” movie. Typically, movies by traditional studios follow rigid release windows that put films exclusively in cinemas for six to nine months. During the pandemic, that went out the window across the board. It made this year’s Oscar films more accessible to watch from home than ever before, but it also mixed up what to consider as a “streaming” movie. 

This is a developing story; check back for updates.