Coda sundance movie#
The Best Picture winner is the movie that the largest voting body in Hollywood, made up entirely of people who are working at the highest levels in the film industry, wish to put forward as the best of the bunch, the example of what we can do. The Academy tends to honor films that it sees as representative, in some way, of the past year in film. On the other hand, it’s hard to see exactly how it fits the Best Picture category. It’s got some songs, and lessons, and a good heart. It’s about ordinary people living ordinary lives. There’s a lot to love about CODA, which feels, in many ways, like the kind of movie you can see any day at Sundance or, these days, on a streaming service. Whether it deserves the award is another question. If voters hadn’t seen the movie when it came out, the barrage of awards would attract their attention - and it could have seemed like a great option, especially to those who might have been tired out by the discourse around other films.Ī night of chaos: 4 winners and 2 losers from the 2022 Oscars Never discount the power of a movie that makes people feel a little verklempt by the end and feel as though they’re contributing to an overlooked issue - in this case, the difficulties deaf people can encounter in navigating a world overwhelmingly biased toward the hearing. It’s got a loving and imperfect family, a teenager with big dreams, and some tearjerking moments. And by the weekend before the Oscars, when the film won Best Adapted Screenplay from the Writers Guild and the top prize from the Producer’s Guild, it started to look like the little movie that could was actually a snowball starting to barrel down the hill. Kotsur won for his performance that night, too, and started to pick up awards: a BAFTA, a Critics’ Choice, an Indie Spirit.
The movie’s fortunes seemed to turn when, in late February, the film won the SAG award for its ensemble cast. Hard to say exactly what happened, but looking at the calendar, you can kind of guess. Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin, and Daniel Durant in CODA. If it nabbed some guild awards, maybe an Indie Spirit, that would be incredible. It did open in theaters, but not many of them. And CODA was released on August 13, 2021, in pre-pandemic times considered a dead spot in the release calendar. Streamers haven’t yet fared very well with the Academy when it comes to winning. The service picked up CODA at Sundance, but it was a big gamble for them.
It was Apple TV+, which is low-key maybe the best streaming service out there but hasn’t managed to get a lot of traction with subscribers in the streamer glut, especially for its movies. And against odds and most predictions until recently, that streaming service wasn’t Netflix, whose films The Power of the Dog and Don’t Look Up were considered among the strongest contenders for the night’s big prize. One Good Thing: A family drama that takes the deaf audience seriouslyīut here we are: A movie distributed by a streaming service has won Best Picture, for the first time in 94 years of Oscar history. It’s sweet, and funny, and a little corny, and very earnest. A large portion of it is in American Sign Language. It’s based on a French film (the very similar 2014 La Famille Bélier). CODA, named for the acronym Children of Deaf Adults, is a movie about a hearing teenager who works with her deaf parents and brother in their fishing business, but harbors aspirations of studying music. Though it starred some well-known performers - including Marlee Matlin, until now the only deaf person to ever win an Oscar for her performance (in 1987 for Children of a Lesser God), and multi-talented now-Best Actor winner Troy Kotsur - it didn’t have any grabby names or obvious Oscar-bait hook.
(There’s been an entire other Oscars since then.) No Sundance premiere has ever won Best Picture. That happened 14 months before these Oscars, which is an extraordinarily long time for a movie to keep picking up steam. (I sure didn’t.)Īnd why would they? With a modest $10 million budget, it premiered at a fully virtual Sundance Film Festival, with all festivalgoers sitting at home on their couches. Until a couple weeks ago, nobody really seemed to think Sian Heder’s film CODA, the little family drama that could, would pull out any Oscar wins, let alone Best Picture.
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