The Curious Case of American Fiction

How did a Best Picture nominee end up buried on a streaming service?

Yesterday, courtesy of Amazon’s streaming platform Prime Video, I watched American Fiction, the only one of the ten Best Picture Oscar nominees I still hadn’t seen. Released theatrically in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the film is a streaming exclusive pretty much everywhere else, an oddity for a title with multiple major Academy Award nominations (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score).

It is the only one of the ten Best Picture nominees to have received such a treatment, which would have been unthinkable even just last year: barring special cases (Netflix-produced films are still ineligible for theatrical release in France if they are to be made available on the streaming service at the same time as all other markets), all the movies had, at the very least, a limited release in multiple territories.