Willem Dafoe might get nominated for an Oscar this year for Poor Things. Poor Things is looking like a critical darling/word-of-mouth success of the season, and Emma Stone isn’t the only actor getting Oscar vibes from the film. If Dafoe does get nominated, it will be his fifth nomination with zero wins. I would argue that Dafoe absolutely should have won for The Florida Project, but that year, the Best Supporting Actor Oscar went to Sam Rockwell for his performance in the god-awful Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I like Sam and everything but for the love of god, Dafoe’s performance was a million times better. Anyway, Dafoe is back on the awards-season grind and he recently made some interesting comments about art in the age of streaming:

Willem Dafoe recently told The Guardian that “more difficult movies, more challenging movies” usually fail to perform well on streaming platforms because most subscribers just want to go home and “watch something stupid.” That’s a problem for someone like Dafoe, whose movies are often dense and challenging such as “The Northman,” “Inside” and “Poor Things,” just to same a few of his recent offerings.

“The kind of attention that people give at home isn’t the same,” Dafoe said. “More difficult movies, more challenging movies can not do as well when you don’t have an audience that’s really paying attention. That’s a big thing. I miss the social thing of where movies fit in the world. You go see a movie, you go out to dinner, you talk about it later, and that spreads out. People now go home, they say, ‘Hey, honey, let’s watch something stupid tonight,’ and they flip through and they watch five minutes of 10 movies, and they say, ‘Forget it, let’s go to bed.’ Where’s that discourse found?”

“They aren’t making movies the same way they used to,” he continued. “They’re being financed by toy companies and other entities, and they become the vehicle to make the movies, because they know how to do that. Streaming, they’re becoming like a monopoly, they have the means of production and distribution. And so it’s very complicated.”

The four-time Oscar nominee couched his comments by noting he’s a “crummy” and “lousy” source to be dissecting the film business or “to have a really good overview on what has changed,” but he’s correct when he says that streamers like Netflix have their own production arms and thus have the power to make and distribute movies straight to an audience designed to like “something stupid” over a challenging movie. Dafoe did not call out Mattel by name, but that toy company now also has a film division (and it’s off to a blockbuster start with “Barbie”).

[From Variety]

He’s right and he’s wrong. I absolutely believe that people are more likely to stream something stupid or uncomplicated just because it’s easier and more accessible. The pandemic showed people that watching the latest movie doesn’t have to be a grind – they can sit at home and watch new(ish) releases in comfort, and that comfort will often extend to, let’s say, “unchallenging” pieces of art. That being said, I rented like ten movies on Vudu over the holidays and I watched them all from the comfort of my home and I watched each one from start to finish because I could engineer my own bathroom breaks and snack breaks. That’s something else which Dafoe is partly referencing too – there are a lot of people who will finish a movie if they “paid” for it. I can watch 20 minutes of some stupid Netflix movie or Prime movie and stop because I don’t feel like I’ve paid specifically for that one bad movie. And yet I finished Killers of the Flower Moon even though 120 minutes into it, I was exhausted by the torture p0rn of Native Americans. I still finished it because I paid for it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.