Amazon beats Netflix at Oscars

Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea

Amazon beat Netflix in the battle of the SVoD services at the Oscars last night, taking home three awards compared with its fierce competitor’s one.

Amazon Studios bagged two statuettes for Manchester by the Sea: a Best Actor trophy for Casey Affleck and Best Original Screenplay.

The SVoD operator also won Best Foreign Language Film for Iranian drama The Salesman, which the service offered to viewers in North America, while Netflix won the documentary short award for The White Helmets, about rescue workers in Syria.

The Oscars are the first to have been won by SVoD operators at the Academy Awards ceremony, which was this year thrown into disarray after the wrong movie was announced as the winner of the most prestigious award of the night.

Faye Dunaway announced that La La Land had won Best Picture after receiving an envelope that contained the details of La La Land’s Emma Stone, who had just been named Best Actress.

However, after several acceptance speeches by La La Land execs, it was announced that Moonlight, a drama about a gay black youth in the US, had actually won the coveted statuette.

Elsewhere OJ: Made in America, from US sportscaster ESPN, took the Academy Award for Best Documentary. The show runs to nearly eight hours and centres on the infamous murder trial as well as race and culture issues in the US. Ezra Edelman directs while ESPN Films distributes.

There had been some controversy about whether the project was a feature doc, thus qualifying for the award, or a miniseries, having aired on ESPN in five separate episodes.