Why Surprise Emmys for ‘Godless’ and ‘Seven Seconds’ Bode Well for Netflix’s Oscar Chances

Monday night’s Emmy Awards were likely a mixed bag if you were a Netflix partisan. Yes, The Crown took home two major awards that eluded them last year — Best Actress for Claire Foy and Directing for Stephen Daldry — but the Outstanding Drama prize went to Game of Thrones for the third time in four years. And for the second consecutive year, a rival streaming platform took a Best Series Emmy before Netflix has won even one. Last year, it was Hulu nabbing Outstanding Drama for The Handmaid’s Tale. This year, it was The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel mopping up the comedy categories for Prime Video.

Yet it’s undeniable that Netflix remains a major awards-season power. The most Emmy nominations of any network/platform, the most wins on Emmy night… There’s a lot to celebrate. And a few of the less-heralded wins on Monday might actually point to sunny skies at an awards show that Netflix is still getting the hang of: the Oscars.

I’m focusing on the three acting Emmys won by Jeff Daniels and Merritt Wever (for Godless) and Regina King (for Seven Seconds) in particular, here. Neither one of those shows made much of a dent in the attention economy (and since Netflix won’t release viewership numbers, the attention economy is one of the few ways we have of measuring Netflix success). Godless was a Western mini-series released just before Thanksgiving last year, and settled into a valley in between Netflix’s highly touted second-season releases of Stranger Things and The Crown. Seven Seconds struggled even more significantly, and Netflix quietly declined to renew it for a second season (thus making it eligible as a mini-series in one of Emmy’s many quirks).

But before Emmy nominations were even announced, there were indications that Netflix wasn’t going to let either show go quietly. Perhaps sensing the weak Limited Series category this year — HBO’s Sharp Objects wouldn’t be eligible; FX was serving up a middling American Horror Story season and an American Crime Story that, while excellent in quality, was not nearly the attention-grabber that The People vs. O.J. Simpson was — Netflix pushed hard with their Emmy campaigns for both Godless and Seven Seconds. As reported over the summer by IndieWire, Netflix made some concrete decisions in prioritizing these shows in particular, at the expense of better-reviewed shows like Alias Grace, American Vandal, and One Day at a Time. That prioritization worked, for Godless and Seven Seconds as well as shows like Ozark, which was similarly un-buzzy yet received some surprising high-profile Emmy nods in the acting (Jason Bateman) and directing categories.

What this shows, beyond just simply shrewd awards-season marketing, is an ability by the Netflix machine to get nominations for shows even if they haven’t fully captured the public imagination; and this is actually a huge part of the game when it comes to Oscar campaigning. Because much of Oscar campaigning happens at the end of the year, when a ton of award-chasing movies get released within a short time frame, not every movie has the luxury of building a groundswell of awards buzz. The mark of a good Oscar studio is an ability to sell a movie as Oscar-worthy — prestigious, artistic, daring — before most audiences even see it.

If Netflix is getting good at this angle of awards season, that bodes very well for its stable of Oscar contenders, which present their own set of challenges. Specifically, the Alfonso Cuaron film Roma and the Paul Greengrass film 22 July, which may well end up being Netflix’s two best chances for Oscar (outside of the Foreign Language and Documentary categories). Both films, especially Roma, have been big hits with critics at film festivals. Roma took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and was runner-up for the People’s Choice award at Toronto. Critics are throwing around words like “masterpiece” to describe it. But it’s going to be a tough sell for Netflix users and film audiences alike. It’s quiet, it’s contemplative, it’s filmed in black-and-white, it has no recognizable movie stars, and none of it is in English. This is an art movie. 22 July presents itself in many of the same ways.

All this time, Netflix has been selling itself as the populist option, where regular movie fans can feast on the endless options for films and TV series that Netflix puts at their fingertips. With Roma, it’s a very different product. Netflix will have to play the cultural curator if they want to get that elusive Best Picture nomination. That means not just simply casting the film into the Netflix abyss and trusting audiences to find it… That means selling Roma as a necessary piece of art that audiences — and especially awards-voters — need to go out of their way to watch.

A year ago, I’d have said that Netflix was in no way equipped to do this. Roma is no Stranger Things or The Crown or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It can’t just wait for audiences to find it. But the Netflix that muscled their way to the Emmy podium for Godless and Seven Seconds? Who campaigned and put up billboards and threw cocktail parties and made sure that Emmy voters knew that they had to pay attention to these shows? That’s the Netflix that could actually push Roma and Alfonso Cuaron to those Oscar nominations. And that campaign has likely already begun.

Stream Godless on Netflix

Stream Seven Seconds on Netflix