Oscars 2020: How many awards will Netflix win?

After a disappointing showing at the Golden Globes, how many awards can we expect Netflix to take home from the 2020 Oscars?

Netflix dominated the Oscar nominations this year! The streaming network totaled 24 nominations for the 2020 Oscars.

As we learned at the Golden Globes, nominations do not always lead to awards. Netflix was up for 34 awards at the Globes and ended up walking away with just two wins (Laura Dern, Marriage Story, and Olivia Colman, The Crown).

The biggest surprise at the Golden Globes was that Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman was among those films that was shut out at the awards. Nominated for five Golden Globes, and now 10 Oscars, The Irishman clearly had the attention of voters, but did it have enough of their attention to walk away with any hardware at the 2020 Oscars?

Of the 24 total nominations, here are the awards we believe Netflix has the best opportunity of walking away with.

Best Supporting Actress

Laura Dern (Marriage Story) came out of nowhere as an awards season darling, but once she arrived she shot to the top of most lists. Coming off of her win at the Golden Globes, belief that Dern will take home the Oscar is strong. Jennifer Lopez was considered to be among the top three for the award, along with Dern and Margot Robbie (Bombshell), but she didn’t even earn a nomination.

With the herd thinned at the top, Dern has to be feeling good about her chances to walk away with her first Oscar win in three tries. Her role in Marriage Story as Scarlett Johansson’s high-powered divorce attorney is deserving of the praise it has been receiving.

Best Director

Martin Scorsese received his 13th and 14th Oscar nominations this year for The Irishman. Of his previous 12, the only win was for The Departed in 2007. His chances this year took a hit with the loss at the Golden Globes but, as we can see by the nominations, this is a different voting body.

The Irishman was initially a front-runner for Best Picture but that seems a lot less likely with the way 1917 has been rolling. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also a favorite for that award and we can’t sleep on Parasite. However, The Academy likes to give Best Director to their second favorite movie or a movie that definitely could have won for Picture. I think that’s what happens here for Scorsese.

One of the Screenplay awards

With three movies nominated across the two screenplay categories, Netflix has to like their odds. While Marriage Story is considered a favorite by GoldDerby.com for Best Original Screenplay, the competition there is stiff, and I’d call the category more of a tossup.

I feel a lot better about The Irishman‘s chances to win Best Adapted Screenplay, especially if it misses on Best Director and Best Picture. Those three awards are likely to be spread across three films this year, and I don’t believe The Academy is going to be able to ignore the gangster epic that many times at the 2020 Oscars.

One technical award

Again, we come back to The Irishman. Nominated for 10 total awards we have to believe that the movie was liked by The Academy. For that reason, I can’t ignore the myriad of technical nominations for the film either.

Of the list, the two best chances for the film are in the Production Design and Film Editing categories. The look and feel of The Irishman had to have appealed to the voters strongly.

Best Documentary Feature

In this category, many saw Apollo 11 as the frontrunner, but then it didn’t receive a nomination. This thrust American Factory into the driver’s seat for the award.

If you haven’t seen American Factory, you should definitely give it a watch. The documentary shows what happened when a factory in Ohio was shut down in 2008, then reopened by a Chinese billionaire in 2014. The documentary is both eye-opening and riveting throughout. A film addressing the economy during the buildup to an election year was likely to tug at the emotional core of the voting body.

Total

Just in case you weren’t keeping count, that’s a prediction of five wins for Netflix. While that’s a low percentage (slightly over 20%), you have to imagine they’ll take what they can get after that embarrassing showing at the Golden Globes.

While our expectations for 2020 Oscars success remain low here, we’ll have to keep an ear to the ground to see if there are any rumors of who might actually be leading these categories.