An early and serious contender for 2017’s Best Picture is a movie that may not have found its way to a theater had it not garnered so much critical acclaim. Dee Rees’s (Pariah) Mudbound is a Netflix original movie, and had it not been for The Academy of Motion Pictures’ rule of all Oscar-nominated films be available to the public via movie theaters, who knows where it would have landed. This is not Netflix’s first movie to receive so much praise that the movie had to be released in the theaters. 2015’s Beasts of No Nation faced a similar fate. However, the kudos that Beasts of No Nation originally received faded as Oscar season approached, and the movie ultimately did not receive a single nomination. The same won’t be the case for Mudbound, which very well could earn a Best Picture nomination as well as nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Mitchell Detroit, Straight Outta Compton), Best Supporting Actress (Mary J. Blige), and Best Adapted Screenplay just to name a few. Of course, it’s an early prediction, and I have yet to see any of the other contenders, but this does feel like a poor year for movies. I would be shocked if Mudbound is not nominated for Best Picture, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t win at least one award in one of the other categories before cinema’s biggest night of the year is complete.
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