For most of the Academy Awards’ history, the definition of a movie was administrative rather than philosophical: to compete for an Oscar, a film needed a paid theatrical run of at least seven consecutive days in Los Angeles County. That single sentence in the eligibility rules held the line between cinema and television for decades. Streaming services spent the 2010s testing it, the pandemic briefly erased it, and the Academy has since rebuilt it in a stricter form. The argument over where films must be shown has become one of the defining industry fights of the era.
Netflix tests the door
Netflix’s first original feature, Beasts of No Nation, released simultaneously online and in a small number of cinemas in 2015, was widely expected to earn Idris Elba an Oscar nomination and received none, a result many read as institutional resistance. Amazon took the opposite approach in 2016, giving Manchester by the Sea a conventional theatrical release before streaming; it became the first Best Picture nominee from a streaming company and won two Oscars. The confrontation sharpened in 2019 with Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which Netflix pushed through a limited theatrical run into ten nominations and three wins, including Best Director. It lost Best Picture to Green Book, and prominent voices, Steven Spielberg among them, publicly questioned whether films built for living rooms deserved cinema’s highest award at all. The Academy examined its rules and, notably, declined to tighten them.
Cannes draws a harder line
Europe’s flagship festival chose confrontation instead. After Netflix entered Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories in competition in 2017, French exhibitors protested, and from 2018 Cannes required competition films to have a French theatrical release. Since French law at the time imposed a wait of roughly three years between cinema release and streaming availability, the rule effectively excluded Netflix, which has stayed out of the festival’s competition ever since. The split illustrated the two positions cleanly: the Oscars regulate a qualifying run, Cannes defends the theatrical window itself.
The pandemic exception and the CODA moment
In April 2020, with cinemas closed worldwide, the Academy did what it had always refused to do and temporarily allowed films with no theatrical release at all to compete, provided a cinema release had been planned. The two ceremonies held under pandemic conditions rewrote the record book. Nomadland won Best Picture in 2021 after debuting on Hulu alongside a limited cinema run. A year later, CODA became the first film from a streaming service to win Best Picture, a triumph for Apple TV+ barely three years after the platform launched, and a film Apple had bought at the 2021 Sundance festival for a record 25 million dollars. The symbolic barrier Spielberg had defended was gone.
The rules tighten again
What followed was not a permanent open door but a correction. The Academy restored the theatrical requirement, expanded the list of qualifying cities beyond Los Angeles, and then went further: for films seeking Best Picture eligibility from the 2024 releases onward, a short qualifying run is no longer enough, and titles must also complete an expanded theatrical release across multiple major markets in the United States. The message was deliberate, that the industry’s top prize now requires demonstrated commitment to cinemas, not a token week. Streamers have adjusted rather than objected, giving awards contenders wider and longer theatrical runs than they did in the Roma era.
A settled truce, for now
The practical outcome is a hybrid settlement. Streaming films compete everywhere, win everywhere, and are no longer treated as a separate category of object, while the theatrical run has been preserved as a ritual of seriousness. Awards season itself has adapted around the new calendar of limited releases and platform dates, and the annual guessing game over contenders now feeds everything from office pools to entertainment betting markets. The question the next decade will answer is not whether streaming films belong at the Oscars, which CODA settled, but whether the expanded theatrical rule marks a durable compromise or simply the industry’s last formal tribute to the big screen.