After the most arduously stretched-out awards season in history, the long-delayed Academy Awards will finally be handed out this weekend – and with them will come the annual commentary over their relevance (or not) to the filmgoing (or not) public. Oscar producers are bracing themselves for all-time low TV ratings, we are told, due to limited audience awareness of this year’s low-key crop of nominees.
Yet for those interested, it’s never been easier to do Oscar catchup viewing: all but four of the 40-odd features nominated for a golden statuette this year are available to watch online. Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s ravishing best picture frontrunner, will join their ranks on Friday when it lands on Disney+, but in its absence, Mubi is streaming Zhao’s beautiful, formative docufiction debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me as useful prep work.
Netflix subscribers have access to more than a dozen nominees on that platform alone, from David Fincher’s Mank – the year’s most nominated film, and surely too divisive to win much, though I warmed to its chewy, inside-baseball take on Hollywood lore – to Aaron Sorkin’s historical courtroom talkfest The Trial of the Chicago 7 to the hothouse stage adaptation Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, for which Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman both have a strong shot at winning for their big, brash lead performances. If the best actress prize were mine to give, it would go to Vanessa Kirby’s gutsy emotional workout in the rich, under-rewarded marital drama Pieces of a Woman, though Netflix is likelier to take the documentary prize for the gorgeously shot, heavily anthropomorphised underwater spectacle of My Octopus Teacher – one word-of-mouth hit that did find a public following, even if critics have been less keen.
It’s Netflix’s chief rival Amazon Prime that has the best of the documentary nominees in Garrett Bradley’s Time, which I’ve celebrated in this column before; Prime subscribers can also see Riz Ahmed’s startling turn in the best picture-nominated Sound of Metal, for which I can only echo my colleague Mark Kermode’s recent enthusiasm.
One film you may not have known you can see on Amazon, however, is Better Days, the utterly gripping Hong Kong youth melodrama that was a smash hit on home turf, but is probably the least publicised of the foreign film nominees. With its themes of high-school bullying and social warfare, blended with saturated teen romance, it’s a refreshing, unlikely pick on the Academy’s part, and deserves to connect universally. (You can head to Curzon Home Cinema to check out its two currently available competitors: the terrific Bosnian genocide drama Quo Vadis, Aida? and the hard-driving Romanian journalism doc Collective.)
Apple TV fared less well than its rivals in the awards race, though it does boast the most rousing and inventively designed of the animated nominees in the Irish folk adventure Wolfwalkers. That it’ll inevitably lose to Pixar’s Soul (on Disney+, of course) is beside the point.
Some of the most rewarding viewing, however, is to be found in the shorts categories. This year’s documentary short category is particularly strong, if not especially cheery. Released by the Guardian and available to watch on this website, Colette is a deeply moving study of a 90-year-old former French Resistance fighter facing buried Holocaust trauma, while Anders Hammer’s Do Not Split (on YouTube) is a remarkable, and artful, street-level account of the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Between those two and the shattering Yemen famine study Hunger Ward – available to watch on the free streaming site Pluto TV – it’s hard to pick a winner.
The live-action and animated short nominees, meanwhile, can all be streamed as a package deal on the ShortsTV website. The live-action crop runs the gamut from the Bafta-winning The Present, an elegantly simple Palestinian father-daughter study, to Oscar Isaac as a lonesome prison officer in the melancholic The Letter Room. The animated shorts lineup, meanwhile, contrasts winsome Pixar cuteness (Burrow) with some more eccentric, international flights of fancy. I’m particularly taken with Genius Loci, a dreamily experimental vision of urban existence, kaleidoscopically rendered in what looks like the most technically advanced tissue-paper collage you’ve ever seen. I’d never have seen it if not for its nomination: the Oscars, it turns out, can still show us a thing or two.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Let Him Go
(Warner Bros)
Kevin Costner and Diane Lane in a wronged-patriarch revenge thriller with neowestern overtones? If you think you’ve travelled back to the 90s, so does this surprisingly taut, entertaining genre exercise, which finds Costner on sturdy form – though it’s Lesley Manville, cast wildly against type as a steely backwoods villain, who romps off with it.
Spring Blossom
(Curzon Home Cinema)
Suzanne Lindon, the 21-year-old daughter of the great French actor Vincent, makes a petal-light but promising directorial debut with this brief, mood-led study of a gawky 16-year-old girl (played by Lindon herself) and her all-consuming crush on an actor (Arnaud Valois) nearly 20 years older than her. If the setup sounds well-worn and distasteful, the youthful femininity of the director-star’s gaze guides it into less expected territory.
The Roy Andersson Collection
(Curzon Artificial Eye)
This beautifully assembled Blu-ray box set will be many a cinephile’s most wanted physical media item of the spring. Its six discs comprise five of the droll Swedish surrealist’s features to date, from his New Wave-inspired 1970 debut A Swedish Love Story to last year’s eerie, exquisitely composed existential mosaic About Endlessness, plus Brit docmaker Fred Scott’s affecting Andersson study Being a Human Person.
