Netflix’s German WWI film won the Baftas, putting it in contention for best picture at this year’s Oscars. According to Nicholas Barber, it’s both an unlikely – and predictable – turn of events.
Some of this year’s Oscar nominations for best picture were predictable. The Fabelmans, for example, is the venerable Steven Spielberg’s love letter to cinema, so that was a given. Top Gun: Maverick was a commercial and critical success, so that was a given. But one film on the shortlist surprised critics: All Quiet on the Western Front. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s classic World War One novel, it had only a few 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 other German film had ever been nominated for best picture. Many critics expected All Quiet on the Western Front to appear on the best international feature list, but it not only received a best picture nomination, but it also received nominations in eight other categories. Then it won the Bafta for best film, and an initially overlooked film became a hot favourite. It was the most shocking Oscar moment since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in 2022.
However, that may be an outdated perspective. The Oscars, and the film industry in general, have undergone radical transformations in recent years. And when you combine those factors, Berger’s epic war drama appears to be the most logical best picture choice of all.
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One significant change occurred in 2009, when the Academy announced that the number of films eligible for best picture would be increased from five to ten. In theory, this would allow blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Wall-E to be nominated for the Oscar, after both were passed over earlier that year. In practise, blockbusters continue to struggle: Black Panther and The Joker are the only superhero films to have been nominated since 2009. However, the new rule has resulted in more unusual films appearing in the best picture lineup – as well as more films that aren’t in English.
Until 2018, only nine such films had been nominated for the award, averaging one every decade. However, since Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma was nominated for the top Oscar in 2019, there has been one non-English-language contender every year – and in 2020, a Korean film, Parasite, won best picture. “Once you get past the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you’ll be introduced to so many more amazing films,” the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho, said as he accepted his statuette.
He was referring to some English-speaking audiences’ reluctance to watch subtitled films, but that reluctance has vanished astonishingly quickly. According to a 2021 study, four out of every five viewers aged 18 to 25 turned on subtitles when watching television, which is four times more than viewers aged 56 to 75. Subtitles are a standard part of the screen experience for young people who are used to peering at videos on phones wherever they happen to be, so they breeze past the “one-inch tall barrier” with ease.
A global revolution
Meanwhile, streaming behemoths have been focused on growing their global subscriber bases, so they have funded, distributed, and promoted non-English language films with zeal that traditional Hollywood studios could never muster. Netflix produced both Roma and All Quiet on the Western Front. The South Korean series Squid Game is still Netflix’s most-watched, 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 easier or more widely accepted.
Without the influence – and money – of Netflix, All Quiet on the Western Front would not exist in its current form. The film is based on a first-person, present-tense account of a dehumanising ordeal in the trenches by a German soldier. Im Westen nichts Neues (literally, “Nothing New in the West”) was published in 1929 to critical acclaim and over 1.5 million copies sold in that year alone. The following year, a film directed by Lewis Milestone was released in the United States, and it went on to win Oscars for best director and best picture. In 1979, a TV movie was released. However, there has never been a German film adaptation of the novel until now. “Films like this aren’t cheap, and they’re difficult to finance,” Berger told Screen Daily’s Demetrios Matheou. “With a star who warrants that kind of budget, you usually need the English language.” However, times have changed. “I think people are now more open to having authentic language, whether it’s from Indonesia or Germany or Spain. That was the right time.”
It is almost unbearably harrowing, but also awe-inspiring and even beautiful in its cinematography and music
In addition to funding All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix has done an outstanding job of promoting it, making it difficult to log on to the platform without being reminded of its existence. It received the most Bafta nominations of any film this year, 14 in total, and won seven of them. 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 saw something that was clearly the result of a lot of hard work: it was as difficult to make as it was to watch, according to one CNN article. And they watched a movie whose scenes of death, destruction, and misery echoed reports from Ukraine’s invasion. In other words, they regularly saw the type of film that used to win best picture.