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Comment by Dahoon | Hacker News Reader

Sounds fair and logic to me. Why should Nextflix be considered Cinema and not TV? Clearly it is watched on TV and belongs with Emmys.

EDIT: HN has turned into Reddit. Don't agree with someone? DOWNVOTE!

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On a different tangent: Why should a movie have to be released in cinemas to be considered eligible for an academy award? A film is a film, so unless the Oscars are owned by the cinema industry (instead of the film industry, which was forcefully separated at some point as a commenter indicated), IMO streaming, direct-to-video and direct-to-TV movies should be eligible to be included as well.

I mean most Netflix (and direct-to-video) films are hit and miss, but there's some good ones there.

As for your comment on voting, don't complain about how people up / downvote your stuff (I mean why do you even care?), instead, write a better comment.

> On a different tangent: Why should a movie have to be released in cinemas to be considered eligible for an academy award?

Since the Academy Awards are a award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is an association of movie industry to promote themselves. Any organization can award whoever they like.

The question is: Should the public give them that much attention?

The attention they're receiving continues to decline. Ratings for the Oscars have been on a long downward trajectory, and that seems likely to continue as long as the show is more about political virtue signaling than it is about the art of making movies.

Heck, they couldn't even find someone willing to host what used to be a plum gig because the political climate in that tiny crowd is so toxic.

It is difficult to determine what constitutes "better" if there is no real feedback on why the current comment is "worse".

They're already giving their movies a limited theater release to comply with existing Oscar eligibility rules.

What's the exact point where something is more TV than cinema ? Does it have to be earnestly made hoping it's not seen by more people than those in the 10 limited release theaters ? Also, none of the Netflix productions was ever TV broadcast, so why call them TV ?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/business/netflix-theater-...

Really the concrete difference is encapsulation of episodes - while TV may have their own story arcs and continuity they are a bunch of beginnings, middles, and ends. Meanwhile movies are longer continuous blocks. Theoretically you could say take a season and stitch together a movie into a run time but the pacing wouldn't fit. TV is just being used as a snarl word without irony from the same people scoffed at by theater.

If you screen a “Netflix Original” in one theater, for one night, as a launch, and then make it available on demand the next day, does that make it a movie?

If not, how many theaters and days must it be? It’s a media version of the abortion debate.

I had the same thought in the back of my head. Netflix could spend some money and open a dedicated theater in some small town to just show all new releases for a week or two. It's not much shorter than any major release spends in the theatres, right?

Since distribution is digital now, maybe they could just align with a midsize chain and offer a "Netflix Night" once a week or something. Hell, it would probably make money.

Or, actually, "Netflix Night" could be free to Netflix subscribers.

Theatres make all of their profit off of concessions, they would jump at the chance to show a film for free.

You bring up an interesting point.

What makes a movie a movie? Does it matter where a movie is watched? Most movies are watched on monitors/tv. If I watch Infinity War on netflix, is it not a movie? If my local theater runs a weeklong viewing of Seinfeld or Friends, does it make Seinfeld or Friends a movie?

To me it is clear that Roma, Annihilation, Birdbox, etc are movies whether they run in the theaters or not.

This seems like Spielberg is using his influence to help the old hollywood studio system maintain it's monopoly on movies and especially the major advertising day known as the Oscars.

I don't think anyone is questioning what is a movie. Spielberg points out that this question is not controversial when it comes to made for TV movies. They are not eligible for oscars but rather emmys. He is arguing that streaming movies are made for the small screen and should qualify for emmys the same as made for TV movies.

Interesting point. But I wonder, why not expand the oscars by including all movies regardless of platform? Make the oscars, a movie awards and advertisement show and the emmy's a tv series awards and advertisement shows.

If VR takes off in 20 years and people watch movies in VR rather than in theaters, how will the oscars distinguish "theater movies" vs "other movies"? If theaters disappear in the manner of phone booths ( a distinct possibility ), will the oscars simply shut down? I doubt that.

Both sides have interesting points and I certainly don't the answers. Maybe the answer is streaming services like netflix, youtube, etc create their own awards advertisement show?

It seems limiting to confine awards to platforms rather than the art genre. It would be like there being a music award dedicated solely for each platform - cassettes, CDs, Vinyl, Radio, Streaming, etc.

Extending reach isn't necessarily a good thing. Just like with software, expanding until it can read email isn't necessarily a good thing.

Why not have a different award? Though, not sure why people even want awards.

Clearly the cinema awards should only be for films - if it's shot digitally, it's not using film, so it's not cinema. The Oscars should be restricted to those works that were shot on film and projected on film without ever going through a fully digital stage.

Netflix has shipped some good movies.

If we limit movies to non-streaming aren’t we going to get slim pickings and mostly infantile superhero flicks?

That’s as short-sighted as believing streaming movies should be excluded. Traditional studios have shipped a lot of quality movies that aren’t superhero flicks. Indeed a very small percentage of traditional studio movies fit that mold.

Traditional studios have shipped a lot of quality movies

Sure, but the problem is that unless you live in a large city with a vibrant independent cinema scene and have a lot of free time on your hands chances are you'll never get to see them (unless they show up on a streaming service 6 month later, ironically enough).

I think we’re talking about entirely different things at this point. The topic was Oscar eligibility, not whether the movies should exist or be available to you.

If Oscars reduce the picks to movies unavailable to the general population, I think that's relevant. Maybe. The Oscars is already an overwhelmingly an absurdly scoped and self-congratulatory event, so maybe it couldn't get any more so.

Hmm interesting I guess I’d never thought of that. I guess I associate Emmy with “movie interrupted by commercials.”

Counterpoint, maybe only films should be eligible for Oscars, as Oscars are for "film makers". Digital cameras would not qualify, right?

Seriously, there was a huge gulf in quality when the best home TV was 19" NTSC 4/3. Nowadays, my picture quality exceeds that of most movie screens (except for imax). I don't see any reason to differentiate.

You have an 8k TV at home? Lucky you. If not, then your home TV doesn't even begin to approach the quality of a modern movie theater.

I said "most movie screens", not a theatre with the best equipment.

My point is that the difference between 2k/4k/8k is noticeable, but not significant. NTSC, at 480i, was a magnitude worse than film.

Is that actually that widespread in theaters? I can't find good sources, but most I can find suggest that it's not yet.

When colour film showed up there were separate colour and black and white Oscars.

Do you consider physical books and e-books to be different as well?

A movie is intended to be watched as a single episode of 1.5-3 hours. TV shows are at least a few episodes long, generally an hour or less per episode but usually much longer in total. Seems a better differentiation than distribution method. Ask someone if they can guess if what you watched was a movie vs a TV show based on your description. Tell some people "I watched it via the internet", and some people "I binge watched 5 episodes" and see who gets the correct answer more often.

Not everything on TV is and episodic show. There is an Emmy for Television Movie so there is as least some recognition out there that there is a difference between movies made for TV and movies made for Cinema. (Although this year the best Television Movie award did go to an episode of a TV show, so I'll admit it is rather muddled).

Spielberg is arguing that movies distributed on streaming platforms are seen on TVs and should be eligible for emmys just like made for TV movies are.

No, he’s arguing that they should be ineligible for the Oscars. He’s campaigning to block them from the Oscars, not to open them up for inclusion in the Emmys. The Emmy reference is merely a rhetorical device he’s employing.

Surely it's inconceivable that you were downvoted because people thought the comment was bad?

Thank you for your deep and insightful commentary.

Sounds like fair and logic to me. Have a DOWNVOTE button? Use it!

At your edit. As per the guidelines lines, if we don't have something constructive to say (re:other replies), we are expected to downvote anything we disgaree with.

It's not Reddit and it's generally not snap votes, it's either agreeing or disagreeing with a point of view. In this case, it seems mostly disagreeing.

The guidelines don't say that. They say you should flag "egregious" comments. Down voting comments you disagree with is absolutely the wrong way to engage in a thread. Down vote incorrect information; if you disagree you should have something to say.

Down voting for disagreement is not banned by the rules (unlike on reddit) and described as acceptable by the site founder and moderators. (even if not all users agree on this)

What's explicitly banned is complaining about downvotes and saying HN is turning into reddit.

I was responding to marak830's claim that the guidelines say you should downvote comments you disagree with. You can look at the guidelines; it's not there. The rest is my opinion.

I believe that downvoting comments that you disagree with is a terrible policy since you end up with an echo chamber where anyone with a contrary opinion gets their comment moved to the bottom of the thread and grayed out. If someone says something you disagree with, the appropriate response is to engage them in a dialog and figure out why they believe what they do, not downvote them.

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