Analyze This: Why ‘Coda’ Won The 2022 Best Picture Oscar

After the dismal ratings of last year’s Oscar broadcast, a lot was in the balance for this year’s edition, one less severely curtailed by Covid protocols but with its own share of new worries and controversy. The decision to have the awards from eight categories (documentary short, film editing, makeup/hairstyling, original score, production design, animated short, live-action short, and sound) handed out at the beginning of the ceremony, before the event actually went live on television, was met with strong resistance from all corners of the industry. The choice felt emblematic of a deep identity crisis affecting the event, whose list of guests and presenters included several personalities more readily associated with Internet culture than with anything to do with cinema, and two new awards geared at attracting a wider, younger audience. 

READ MORE: Oscars 2022: ‘CODA’ Wins Best Picture, ‘Dune’ Takes 6 Awards [Full Winners List]

It was therefore rather unsurprising to find that the entire ceremony gave off a painful sense of desperation. Hosts Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes did manage to get a few good laughs (a highlight was Schumer calling “Being the Ricardos” director Aaron Sorkin a genius for making a film about Lucille Ball that is never once funny), but more than once their jokes failed to land. A low point was Regina Hall’s weird routine about getting a bunch of hot male nominees backstage to “get them tested” — wink wink — or the similarly crass and inappropriate moment where she “searched” Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin. The decision to include rather random montages in honor of James Bond films and the 15th anniversary of “Juno” was baffling, while the “Pulp Fiction” skit — a film that is now 28 years old — revolved around how funny and random it is to know all the lines from one of the most quotable American films of all time. Though “White Men Can’t Jump” is celebrating this year the round number of 30 years since its release, the skit by its three lead stars was only just about saved by Rosie Perez’s charm and quick response to Wesley Snipes’ confusion. Several of the presenters in fact appeared not to have rehearsed much at all, to the point where it sometimes felt like the organizers had never tried to broadcast a ceremony live before. 

READ MORE: 2022 Oscars: The Best & Worst

Contributing to the disjointed atmosphere was the regular interruption of the live broadcast by edited, recently pre-taped footage of those eight awards that were not shown live. To be clear: organizers did not want to show these categories live, but they also did not want to not show them at all, and so they played, within the live broadcast, truncated clips of what had just been recorded an hour or two before. Speeches from the winners in those eight categories were cut short (some winners apparently voiced their dissatisfaction then, but those inconvenient moments were edited out), and the choice not to show people as they walked up to the stage was incredibly disorienting for anyone watching the broadcast. Winners would be announced and immediately appear on stage, with nothing but the rules of physics to indicate that those moments, visually identical to anything else in the ceremony, were in fact pre-recorded. 

READ MORE: Oscars 2022: The Snubs & Surprises

The general sense of malaise was not alleviated by the winners of the main awards, which were extremely predictable this year — save for the awardees of the two new and, it now seems likely short-lived categories that were created for this edition in another desperate attempt to make young people care about the Oscars. The #OscarsCheerMoment and the #OscarsFanFavorite, which asked online fans to vote for “the movie scene that made you cheer the loudest (ANY movie/year)” and their favorite film of the year respectively, appeared clearly aimed at making fans of Marvel and specifically its box office record-breaking “Spider-Man: No Way Home” tune into the ceremony. But that was without counting on Zack Snyder fans. After successfully convincing Warner Bros. to let Snyder realize his full vision by producing at incredible costs the “Snyder cut” of “Justice League,” perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising that his fans one more time beat impossible odds and won the director two “Oscars.” The number 1 #OscarsCheerMoment, selected by voters who could choose from the entire history of cinema, was the scene in “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” when “The Flash enters the Speed Force,” while the #OscarsFanFavorite was his Netflix film “Army of the Dead.” As bleak and strange as the existence of those categories were, they at least provided this year an element of safe, in no way physically harmful surprise — as opposed to the incredible altercation between Chris Rock and Will Smith that is now making all Oscar-related headlines. 

What of the other Oscars disruptors, namely the streamers? This wasn’t the first year one of their films was in for a chance to win Best Picture (David Fincher’s “Mank” was up for the award last year) but with both “CODA” from Apple and Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” from Netflix deemed favorites, never did the platforms have it so good. More later on what this means for them, but first, how did this happen? 

SVOD Help Us
Though released by Netflix with little fanfare in cinemas in November 2021, followed by a platform release on December 1st, Jane Campion’s western made a late, dramatic return to the Oscars conversation, to the point where it was deemed the most likely to go home with the main statue until just a couple of weeks ago. But this was without counting on an even faster comeback from Apple’s “CODA.” Sold to the platform following its Sundance 2021 premiere for a festival-record $25 million, the film was later dumped on the platform like so much streamer fare in August 2021 — months before “The Power of the Dog” was added to its respective platform. By the morning of Sunday 27th, “CODA” was most people’s bet for Best Picture winner.

The easiest explanation for the phenomenal results of both films is, of course, money. Netflix and Apple both have the funds necessary to inundate all corners of the Internet as well as IRL locations with marketing, should they choose to do so — which makes one wonder about the fate of so many of their other films, which usually sink without a trace without many people even knowing of their existence. By contrast, even the most casual film viewer has now at least heard of “The Power of the Dog” and “CODA.” 

This is good news for a ceremony so extremely anxious about appearing too high-brow, despite the fact that most winners in recent years have been very popular films (“Parasite” was a foreign film, but it was also an absolute smash both locally and in the US). Which brings us to another factor that might have played in the two films’ favor. 

The Power of the Underdog 
After Chloé Zhao’s win with “Nomadland” last year, a female-directed Best Picture winner felt likelier but was nowhere near a given. However, in an industry more conscious than ever about how it appears to the outside world, a win for the women-directed films “CODA” or “The Power of the Dog” was always going to be a nice bonus. It no doubt helped that neither film dealt with exclusively female topics, and that both scored further “progressive” points in other categories. 

Though Campion’s film isn’t a revisionist western by any measure, it does work as a corrective to the mistaken yet widely held opinion that in its heyday, the Western was always racist, homophobic, and generally “toxic.” Campion’s return also makes for a great comeback story: the first woman to ever win the Palme d’Or in Cannes with “The Piano” in 1993, she became this year the first to be nominated twice for the Best Director Oscar. 

“CODA” also had a lot going for it. Beside being the first film with a predominantly deaf cast in leading roles to be nominated for Best Picture (though its lead herself isn’t deaf), its cast member Troy Kotsur also became the first deaf male actor to be nominated for Best Actor. He won in his category, thus following in the footsteps of history-making co-star Marlee Matlin, the first deaf performer to ever win an Academy Award (in her film debut “Children of a Lesser God” in 1986). 

So many good points that the other nominees simply did not have. 

The Other Guys
Shot in black-and-white and reportedly inspired by its director’s childhood, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” failed to rouse the enthusiasm generated by Alfonso Cuarón’s more arthouse-flavored “Roma” — which at the time lost to the more banal, well-intentioned, made-for-the-Oscars film “Green Book.” 

In fact, “King Richard” in some ways fit into the “Green Book” category as another inspiring, classically made biopic set in the past of the kind the Oscars often favor. Its biggest asset however was always Will Smith’s central performance, which the entire film was essentially a vehicle for — though centered on a Black story, the film is more reserved and polite about the inequality encountered by Venus and Serena Williams during their childhoods and careers than it could have been.

The muted response received by Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” relegated it to craft categories early on, and this despite the director’s win with “The Shape of Water” in 2018. Meanwhile, Denis Villeneuve’s large-scale sci-fi origin story “Dune” seemed destined to a similar fate from the start — a sentiment only heightened by the fact that Villeneuve was not nominated for the Best Director statuette this year. 

Oscar royalty Steven Spielberg was of course among the nominees with his “West Side Story” remake, though the film’s dismal results with audiences rather dimmed its spark. A remake broadly less well-liked than the original stood little chance to win the ceremony’s main award. 

At the center of the “discourse” when it started streaming in December 2021, Adam McKay’s environmental satire “Don’t Look Up” — distributed worldwide by Netflix — has rather fallen off the radar since. Though satires haven’t had quite as bad a time at the Oscars as they historically used to (remember “Jojo Rabbit”?), the negative reviews extinguished the film’s chances to get the big prize a while ago. 

For arthouse cinephiles, this year’s list of Best Picture nominees was particularly exciting due to the presence of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.” The former was the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture, a historic fact that may help open the Academy’s doors to other foreign and in particular Asian filmmakers in the future (though let’s abstain from equating American success with the apotheosis of success tout court). Paul Thomas Anderson, meanwhile, is no stranger to the ceremony, though the fact that his film scored a nomination in this category despite being one of the least straightforward films he has made to date and one of his most divisive is already immensely satisfying. However, neither film truly managed to cross over into the mainstream, with audiences baffled either by the former’s length, or the latter’s… everything. 

Could it be that to some the “confusing” ending of “The Power of the Dog” likewise did not work in its favor? 

A “CODA” Coup Over Auteur’s Oater  
A nice drama about overcoming difficulty always appears likelier to win than a less straightforward and less obviously progressive film. But in this case, Campion’s faux pas at the Critics Choice Awards where she compared her plight to that of Venus and Serena Williams, saying they “do not play against the guys like I have to,” did not make matters easier for her. Even if Campion had never heard of mixed tennis games, it does not take watching “King Richard” to know about the sexism and misogyny that are rife in sports. The director later apologized, but the damage was done. Later, the discourse around Sam Elliott’s dislike of the film, what truly constitutes a western, and what westerns really used to be like, perhaps proved a little too much hard work for some voters. CODA, on the other hand, was harmless and safe. 

The Pictures Got Small 
“CODA” has therefore become the first film distributed by a streaming platform to win the award for Best Picture. The scenario was bound to occur eventually, as streaming continues to expand its stranglehold on the film industry, but Netflix was always seen as the frontrunner in that race to the Oscars by virtue of being older and the main, original disruptor in the world of streaming. 

It is worth noting here that Apple did not produce “CODA” — remember the time when the distinction was still made between platform as distributor and platform as producer? — and that “The Power of the Dog” on the other hand was produced by Netflix. The time when a film which originated at a platform (and was not simply purchased by one) wins the Oscar for Best Picture is yet to come.