Will this WW1 film win best picture?
Some of the nominations for best picture at this year’s Oscars were easy to predict. The Fabelmans is the venerable Steven Spielberg’s love letter to cinema, for instance, so that was a dead cert. Top Gun: Maverick was a commercial and critical smash, so that was always a shoo-in, too. But one film on the shortlist took pundits by surprise: All Quiet on the Western Front. Adapted from the classic World War One novel by Erich Maria Remarque, it was given a mere scattering of cinema showings before streaming on Netflix; it starred an Austrian actor, Felix Kammerer, who had never been in a film before; and its director, Edward Berger, had done most of his work in television. It was also German – and no previous German film had ever been in the running for best picture. Plenty of critics expected All Quiet on the Western Front to turn up on the best international feature list, but not only did it get a best picture nomination, it appeared in eight other categories, too. And then it won the best film award at the Baftas, and an initially overlooked film became a hot favourite. It was the biggest Oscar shock since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in 2022.
Still, perhaps that’s an outdated way of looking at it. The Oscars, and the film industry in general, have changed recently in all sorts of radical ways. And if you put those ways together, then suddenly Berger’s epic war drama seems like the most logical best picture choice of all.
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One significant reform came in 2009, when the Academy announced that the number of films in the best picture category was being increased from five to 10. In theory, this would allow such blockbusters as The Dark Knight and Wall-E to be nominated for the top prize, as both had been snubbed earlier that year. In practice, blockbusters still don’t have much luck: Black Panther and Joker are the only superhero movies to have been shortlisted since 2009. But the new rule has led to more unusual films appearing in the best picture line-up – and more films that aren’t in English, too.
Up until 2018, only nine such films had ever made it into the category: a rough average of one every decade. But ever since Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma was nominated for 2019’s top Oscar, there has been one non-English-language contender every year – and a Korean film, Parasite, won best picture in 2020. “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” said the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho, when he collected his statuette.
The German film was adapted from the classic World War One novel by Erich Maria Remarque (Credit: Reiner Bajo/Netflix)
He was referring to the reluctance of some English-speaking audiences to engage with subtitled films, but that reluctance has evaporated astonishingly quickly. A study published in 2021 revealed that four out of five viewers between the ages of 18 to 25 switched on the subtitles when they watched television – four times more than viewers between 56 and 75. For young people who are used to peering at videos on phones wherever they happen to be, subtitles are a standard part of the screen experience, so they skip over the “one-inch tall barrier” with ease.
A global revolution
Meanwhile, streaming giants have focused on building up their subscriber bases around the globe, so they have funded, distributed and promoted non-English language films with an enthusiasm that traditional Hollywood studios could never muster. Both Roma and All Quiet on the Western Front are Netflix productions. Squid Game, from South Korea, remains Netflix’s most-watched series, and the same platform had such a smash hit with France’s Call My Agent! that the subsequent English-language remake, Ten Percent, felt like a waste of time. International films and television series have never been more accessible or accepted.
Certainly, All Quiet on the Western Front wouldn’t exist in its current form without the influence – and money – of Netflix. The film is adapted from a first-person, present-tense account of a German soldier’s dehumanising ordeal in the trenches. Im Westen nichts Neues (literally, “Nothing New in the West”) was published in 1929 to great acclaim and sales of more than 1.5 million copies in that year alone. A US film directed by Lewis Milestone was released the following year, and went on to win Oscars for best director and best picture. A TV movie came out in 1979. But there has never been a German film of the novel until now. “Films like this are not cheap and they’re difficult to get financed,” Berger told Demetrios Matheou at Screen Daily. “Usually you need the English language, with a star who warrants that type of budget.” But today things are different. “I think people are now more open to having authentic language, whether it’s from Indonesia or Germany or Spain. The time was right for that.”
As well as funding All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix has done an exemplary job of promoting it, ensuring that it is hard to log on to the platform without being reminded of its existence. It had more Bafta nominations than any other film this year – 14 in total – and it converted seven of them into wins. This success, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, was “a tribute to a very shrewd marketing campaign from a certain streaming service… which kept doggedly putting its prestige product under Bafta voters’ noses”.
The return of the “Oscar movie”
Anyone persuaded by that marketing campaign found themselves watching a technically stunning, stirringly acted chronicle of war at its most hellish, a film that was almost unbearably harrowing, but also awe-inspiring and even beautiful in its cinematography and music. They watched something that clearly resulted from a huge amount of exhausting work: it was every bit as gruelling to make as it was to watch, in the words of one CNN article. And they watched a film whose scenes of death, destruction and misery resonated with reports from the invasion of Ukraine. In other words, they watched the kind of film that used to win best picture on a regular basis.
There was a time, in the 1990s and 2000s, when everyone knew what an “Oscar movie” was. Sitting right between art-house cinema and multiplex entertainment, it was a lavish, spectacular treatment of a historic tragedy (Dances with Wolves, Titanic, Schindler’s List), sometimes concerned with contemporary social issues (Crash) and sometimes based on a novel (The English Patient). It was proof that Hollywood could make mature, important films.
Not only did All Quiet on the Western Front get a best picture nomination, it appeared in eight other categories (Credit: Reiner Bajo/Netflix)
But Hollywood doesn’t like to make those films any more. The major studios now prefer to spend their money on superhero sequels, which means that, in the last few years, the best picture field has been left wide open for a quirky, indie-leaning bunch of nominees: a sweet little family comedy drama (Coda), a semi-improvised docudrama (Nomadland), a poetic meditation on race and sexuality (Moonlight), and so on. Most of this year’s best picture nominees are similarly offbeat. In their own ways, The Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness, Tár, Women Talking, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are all far weirder than what used to be thought of as an Oscar movie. None of them has the mainstream appeal to build a firm consensus behind it. And then there is All Quiet on the Western Front: big, serious, based on a revered novel, and with production values that are dazzlingly clear to anyone who presses play. It might be German, but in many respects, it is the most obvious best picture nominee of the lot.
That’s the view in Germany, anyway. As Philip Oltermann noted in an article in The Guardian, the country’s critics have slated the film, and one key theme of their damning reviews is that Berger has a severe case of “Oscar-Geilheit” or “lust for an Oscar”. The director didn’t even make a legitimate adaptation of the novel, argues Hubert Wetzel in Süddeutsche Zeitung. Instead, “148 minutes of blockbuster-worthy war kitsch are given a title that is known worldwide and guarantees prestige and good sales. Maybe even an Oscar.”
It’s a sign of how quickly the industry is changing. All Quiet on the Western Front can be seen as an unlikely best picture contender, but also as a film that is too much of a best picture contender for its own good.
All Quiet on the Western Front is available to stream on Netflix.
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