Netflix Queue | Oscar Noms 2021 Are In!

And the Nominees Are . . .

When the Academy Awards are broadcast live from the Dolby Theatre and Union Station on April 25, a broad spectrum of Netflix storytellers will be celebrated for their work across narrative features, documentaries, animation, and music.

19 March 202112 min read

FEATURES

The year’s most nominated film is David Fincher’s black-and-white Hollywood saga Mank, which earned nominations in nearly every major category, including Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Production DesignMakeup and Hairstyling,  Costume DesignSound, and Original Score. Acting nominations went to both Gary Oldman, for his role as Herman Mankiewicz, the writer who penned the first draft of what would become Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, and Amanda Seyfried, for her portrayal of actress Marion Davies.

“It’s like riding in a Rolls-Royce or sitting in first class,” Oldman says of being directed by Fincher. “The captain up there in the cockpit has flown thousands of hours. You sit back and relax and think, Well, this guy knows what he’s doing.

For Seyfried, joining the cast provided her the opportunity to give the oft-slighted Davies her due. “I started with terror inside of me, because she’s Marion Davies. She’s a glamorous movie star from the Golden Age,” Seyfried explains. “I knew I needed to get as much information as possible — which was not that easy, surprisingly. She’s done so many movies, but she is a mystery. . . . She told it like it was. Not a lot of women did, especially in that era. She really had no shame about anything, and that was very modern.”

Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt sits on a camera rig which is positioned in a hallway at the Hearst Castle replicated set of Mank. Some of the crew are behind the rig, operating cameras as Messerschmidt takes a moment to pause.

Photo by Gisele Schmidt-Oldman

I like that period immediately after the rehearsal when you get to formulate your dreams. Then you spend the rest of the day crushing them. I like that process of figuring it out, watching David block with the actors and watching them work the scene out, and then talking with him about how we’re going to cover it or how it’s going to be lit. That’s really where the scene emerges: in that short period between the rehearsal and the first shot you do in the scene.

Erik Messerschmidt, Mank cinematographer

Writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 resonated strongly in 2020, with a story about the pivotal 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The film earned nods in the Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, and Original Song categories. “I like to parachute the audience into something that’s already moving a hundred miles an hour,” Sorkin says. “It makes you sit forward a little bit. Your mind is put to work right away. That’s what we do in Chicago 7.

Sacha Baron Cohen also received a Supporting Actor nomination for his standout performance in a stellar ensemble, portraying activist Abbie Hoffman. “We often had hundreds of extras filling the courtroom,” he shares. “I remember the first rehearsal, everybody ran their lines, and at the end, all the extras applauded as if they’d just seen an incredible Broadway play. The level that these actors work at is inspiring, and for someone like me, completely intimidating.”Baron Cohen was also thrilled to be working with Sorkin for the first time: “Everybody wants to say Aaron’s words on camera. I think he’s the modern-day Shakespeare — and he’s a lot more consistent and reliable; he hasn’t had any flops, no Titus Andronicus.

In a still from The Trial of the Chicago 7, Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) and a protestor make their way through a cloud of tear gas. Rubin has his arm around the protestor, who is holding a handkerchief to her mouth and nose.

Image courtesy of Netflix

There was quite a seamless transition from our actual footage to three black-and-white shots of the real gathering. It tied it together very quickly without saying much. We never wanted to feel like we needed to use the footage. We felt it was just an addition that enhanced things.

Editor Alan Baumgarten, on piecing together the riot scenes in The Trial of the Chicago 7

In addition to nominations for Makeup and Hairstyling,Production Design, and Costume Design, George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom scored acting nominations for both of its leads, Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman.“

It’s a behemoth of a role,” says Davis of Ma Rainey, the character that’s brought the actress to her fourth nom. “You don’t have the benefit of seeing her in her private life, in bed with [girlfriend] Dussie Mae or alone with herself. You see her in that recording studio having to set [managers] Irvin and Sturdyvant and her band members straight. For me as an actor, it was about problem-solving. How do you show as much emotion when all you have is a slice of her time?” 

The actress is also tremendously grateful for the time she spent working with Boseman in his final film role. “Everything that he did was spiritually intentional — even what he did while he was waiting in between setups on the set,” she says. “Working with him, it made you step up. It made you check yourself in terms of your integrity. He forced you through the sheer energy that emanated from him to be purposeful and honest.”

Costume designer Ann Roth looks over the costume of Dussie Mae actor Taylour Paige. A busy set lives and breathes behind them.

Photo by David Lee

It’s a difficult thing, to think of yourself acting and singing in a rubber suit for two months. We put the suit on, I slid a dress of the period over her body, and that did it. When she looked in the mirror, she started to see someone else. And that is the secret to being free to be someone else.

Costume designer Ann Roth, on Viola Davis’s first fitting for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Additional Netflix feature honorees include: supporting actress Glenn Close, whose performance in Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy earned her her eighth nomination (the makeup and hairstyling team who helped create her incredible transformation also received a nod); first-time nominee Vanessa Kirby, recognized in the Best Actress category for her heart-wrenching turn in Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman; writer-director Ramin Bahrani, also a first-time nominee, for his adapted screenplay for The White Tiger; and the visual-effects team behind George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky.

DOCUMENTARIES


Netflix was well-represented in the documentary branch, with Documentary Feature nominations for My Octopus Teacher and Crip Camp, and a Documentary Short nod for A Love Song for Latasha.

My Octopus Teacher directors Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed turned eight years and three thousand hours’ worth of footage into the year’s unlikeliest story of friendship, following South African ocean diver Craig Foster and a majestic eight-limbed mollusk. “It’s a love story about a friendship between a human being and a wild animal, but it’s also a love story about our relationship with the natural world,” Ehrlich told Women and Hollywood.

Crip Camp, having already taken home the Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at Sundance, now finds itself part of a new awards conversation. The film comes from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, whose documentary American Factory won the Oscar last year. Using archival footage and contemporary interviews, Crip Camp illustrates how a group of teenagers with disabilities who met at a summer camp in 1971 went on to help launch the disability rights movement.

The film was co-directed by Nicole Newnham and by Jim LeBrecht, who has worked on more than 145 films and whose own time at Camp Jened is depicted in the film. “When you have filmmakers with disabilities telling the stories and doing it well, you realize that obviously that’s the way to do it,” LeBrecht says. “This is what we know from every other marginalized community, right? We need people from the community as directors, as producers, as casting agents. I’m not saying that allies aren’t important; they truly are. But what are we all after in this world? Authenticity. We want something that feels real and dramatic and new and exciting and sexy and funny and compelling.”

Sophia Nahli Allison’s short A Love Song for Latasha closes out Netflix’s documentary nominations. The project was filmed nearly 30 years after 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was killed by a Los Angeles convenience-store owner who wrongly accused her of stealing a bottle of orange juice. Allison achieves more than a retelling of how events that day contributed to the 1992 civil rights uprising in L.A.; the film celebrates Harlins’s life and the future she should have had, as well as the dreams of other Black girls. “I want Black girls to know their power, to remember their ancestral brilliance. I want them to create their own archive and to reclaim their stories,” Allison says. “I want Black girls to radically build a new future for themselves.”

ANIMATION


Netflix received animation nominations three times over this year, with two for Best Animated Feature and one for Best Animated Short.

Industry icon Glen Keane’s adventure feature Over the Moon tells the story of Fei Fei — a young heroine as bold and brave as those Keane created for The Little Mermaid and Tangled — who journeys to the stars to meet with the Chinese moon goddess Chang’e. “Fei Fei lived up to everything that I love in animation, which is characters who believe the impossible is possible,” says Keane. “Here’s this girl who’s a genius with science and math and physics and technology, but then she also has her mother’s faith. She sees what others don’t see, and she’s willing to put everything on the line to pursue that.”

Also nominated in the Animated Feature category is Richard Phelan and Will Becher’s Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, the third film spun off of the popular British stop-motion animation series Shaun the Sheep. It marks the first time either has been nominated for an Oscar.

And first-time directors Will McCormack and Michael Govier received their first Oscar nominations this year, for their animated short If Anything Happens I Love You, a deeply affecting story of parents dealing with the aftermath of a school shooting, for which they also wrote the script. “Sandy Hook was eight years ago. This has been going on for a long time and it hasn’t changed. Pain has been building and people haven’t had a place to put it,” says McCormack. “And the fact that people have responded to this short was, for me, an emphatic declaration that people really do want to feel and they do want to feel relief and they do want to be a part of grief and they’re not afraid to be vulnerable, to show their feelings. That is the power of story, right? Stories don’t become statistics.”

A still from the animated film If Anything Happens I Love You. A yellow-hued watercolor splash surrounds a couple who are embracing each other in grief. Tears run down their somber faces.

Image courtesy of Netflix

I feel so moved to be part of something that showcases the amazing work of an all-female animation team. . . . I fell so in love with the animation. It is esoteric and spiritual in nature. It feels like a warm wind as you’re watching it — memory and grief often feel like that. There’s such love in it.

Laura Dern, If Anything Happens I Love You executive producer

MUSIC


Composer Terence Blanchard received his second Oscar nomination, this time for his original score for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. Blanchard first worked with Lee when he played trumpet on 1988’s School Daze, and Lee later tapped him to compose the music for 1991’s Jungle Fever. Over the years they’ve worked on almost 20 projects together. “Most people may not know that Spike really doesn’t like action music. He wants really melodic, mostly operatic music,” Blanchard says. “So when that action starts [in Da 5 Bloods], I had to figure out a way to make that music constantly shift, because the action is moving and shifting. Working on this film was an incredible experience because literally what I had to do was just watch the film. I know that sounds simple.”

Meanwhile, Longtime David Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who previously won the Oscar for scoring 2010’sThe Social Network, have now received an Original Score nomination for their work on Mank. “Usually, it’s the two of us in the studio and when we finish, it’s done. This, we endlessly tweaked back and forth with David,” recalls Reznor. “The other hidden surprise that no one was expecting was that there was a global pandemic and no one could actually record in the same room. That situation emerged about halfway through the translation from our demos to the arrangements.”

In the Best Original Song category, Netflix also scored a hat trick of nominations that includes Diane Warren and Laura Pausini’s “Io Sì (Seen)” from La vita davanti a sé (The Life Ahead), Daniel Pemberton and Celeste’s “Hear My Voice” from The Trial of the Chicago 7, and the memorable anthem “Húsavík” by Savan Kotecha, Fat Max Gsus, and Rickard Göransson, from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. “My wife’s Swedish, and we lived in Stockholm for 15 years,” says Kotecha, who has written smash hits for Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, and Usher. “Every year Eurovision was like the Super Bowl and it would shut down the city. Her friends would rent rooms in restaurants where you go to watch. And I know a lot of the Eurovision writers from Sweden.”

Composer Terence Blanchard is at his music stand with his arms raised up as he conducts. He has on large, over-the-ear headphones and a black hoodie.

Photo by Matt Sayles

I was scared to death working on Da 5 Bloods. What’s that analogy I always use? Fast break, 10 seconds left in the game. You’re on the team with Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen. They shoot you the ball in the corner, one second left. When you take the shot, you have to have the skills to take the shot. When Spike gave me the film I was like, Oh my God, everybody’s done their work. Now it’s left to me.

Terence Blanchard, on composing the score for Da 5 Bloods