This pundit, for one, did not.
Bolstered by the pandemic, 2021 was supposed to be the awards year of streamer domination.
The year Netflix finally ran the table.
(L to R) Glynn Turman, Chadwick Boseman, Michael Potts, and Colman Domingo in ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’.David Lee/Netflix
The year the traditional players faded away, unable to keep up while we all watched movies at home.
Butduring Sunday’slong, meandering,harrowingly anticlimactic Academy Awards, the story turned out to be quite the opposite.
Around the tragedy and uncertainty and production horrors (why, Steven Soderbergh, why!
), this institution held steady.
Did an anti-Netflix bias, as we knew existed years ago, persist?
Did the streamer’s enormous campaigns fail to take them all the way?
Yet again, it seems so.
The paradigm did not quite shift.
