The delayed Academy Awards have left us with an empty hole where there was once sure to be a montage of celebrities professing their love for the magic of movies. Where is our weird, awkward sales pitch for the concept of the motion picture? How will we know whether or not films can still make us feel? And what will we do without some painfully scripted, jokey interactions between arbitrary movie stars?
Fear not! In lieu of the Oscars, Netflix has it covered.
Have a look with Netflix’s 2021 film preview, a trailer offering the above content alongside a series of context-free clips showing off the year’s coming releases. It basically amounts to “Look how we got proper A-listers to do a bunch of Netflix movies. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are in Adam McKay’s asteroid movie, and here they are standing nearly motionless as evidence. Sure, an action-comedy with Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson, and Gal Gadot seems like it was created by an algorithm. But at least you can watch it at home, right?”
Unfortunately, yes.
