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The season of the screeners

Every winter, between the first festival prizes of the autumn and the night of the Academy Awards in February or March, Hollywood lives in a season of its own. The studios send copies of their films, the screeners, to the thousands of members of the Academy who will vote; the trade papers count the nominations; and audiences hurry to catch up with the films everyone is talking about before the ceremony. SeeHD was a film site of the years 2018 to 2020 whose menu offered a page dedicated to the screeners of the 2017-2018 season. This guide takes that page as its starting point and builds a whole site on the awards season. It follows six ceremonies of the Academy Awards, from 2016 to 2021, and gathers 166 of their nominees, each with its English synopsis, its cast, its director and a Watch now button that opens it on JustWatch.

The 166 films sit on twelve shelves in three families. Best Picture holds every nominee for the top award of the six ceremonies, 51 films in three shelves of two years each, from Spotlight and The Revenant in 2016 to Nomadland and The Father in 2021. Animated and international holds the nominees for best animated feature and best international feature film. And Performances and crafts holds the films nominated for acting, for visual effects, and for screenplays, music, sound, costume and make-up. The guide The awards season explains the idea, and the guide Start with SeeHD picks one film from each family.

Together the 166 films carry about 1.36 million votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.4, and 24 of them reach 8 or more. The best rated is Parasite, the Korean film of 2019 by Bong Joon Ho, at 8.5, the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture, and the most voted is Avengers: Infinity War, with about 33,000 votes, a nominee for visual effects. The guide The six ceremonies follows the nights one by one.

The site of 2018

The Wayback Machine keeps copies of seehd.pl from February 2018 to January 2020, and the pages show a site built on a common WordPress theme of the time. The page is dark, almost black, with a fine diamond pattern. At the top, a light grey bar carries the name of the site in white on a sky-blue block, with a Menu button on the right; below it, a dark band holds a wide white search field and a blue Search button. The content sits in a white column with a thin grey border: sky-blue bars announce the sections, Featured and Latest Releases, and under each bar the posters sit in small white boxes with a thin border, a black strip with the title and a little blue tag for the quality of the copy. On the right, a sidebar of light grey panels headed in charcoal lists the trending films, and a near-black footer closes the page. The menu of February 2018 carried, next to Home, Movies, TV Shows and Release Dates, the item that gives this guide its subject: the Academy Award screeners of 2017 and 2018.

This guide keeps that look: the dark patterned page, the grey header with its blue name block, the white column and the blue section bars, the posters in bordered boxes with a black strip at the bottom, and the grey sidebar on the right, which here lists the twelve shelves under the heading Trending. The strip of each poster carries the category and the year of the ceremony, such as Best Picture 2020 or Animated 2018. Behind every poster there is a full film page with the synopsis, the cast and the Watch now button, which opens JustWatch, the service that shows where the film can be streamed, rented or bought in your country. The guide The site of 2018 describes the capture.

How the shelves work

The Best Picture shelves are complete: every film nominated for the top award at the six ceremonies is here, eight in 2016, nine in 2017, nine in 2018, eight in 2019, nine in 2020 and eight in 2021. The other shelves are selections. For each of them the guide gathers the nominees of the category over three or six ceremonies and keeps the thirteen most voted on TMDB, or all of them when there are fewer, as for the international films of 2019 to 2021. A film nominated in several categories appears only once, on the first shelf that applies in the order of the families: a Best Picture nominee stays with Best Picture even when it won for its actors or its effects, and an animated feature stays with the animated films even when it was also nominated for a song.

The years of the shelves are the years of the ceremonies, which honour the films of the previous year: the Academy Awards of February 2016 honoured the films of 2015, and those of April 2021, delayed by the pandemic, honoured the films of 2020 and the first weeks of 2021. Documentaries and short films are left out, so that every film of the guide is a feature with a story. The guide How the shelves work sums up the rules.

Best Picture

The first family, Best Picture, holds the 51 nominees for the top award of the six ceremonies. It is the best rated family of the guide, with an average of 7.6 and thirteen films rated 8 or more, and it shows how wide the taste of the Academy became in those years: superhero films and silent-looking dramas, a Korean satire and a Mexican memory in black and white, war films, musicals and a fish-man romance. The guide Best Picture sums it up.

Best Picture, 2016 and 2017

The shelf Best Picture, 2016 and 2017 holds the eight nominees of February 2016 and the nine of February 2017. The ceremony of 2016 crowned Spotlight, by Tom McCarthy, with Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams, the true story of the reporters of the Boston Globe who uncovered the abuse of children by priests in their city and the silence of the Church; it also won the award for its original screenplay. The night belonged as much to Mad Max: Fury Road, by George Miller, which won six awards, the most of the evening, all for its crafts, from editing to costume, and to The Revenant, by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, which won best director for the second year running and the first acting award of Leonardo DiCaprio, as a trapper left for dead in the frozen wilderness of 1823.

The other nominees of 2016 were The Martian, by Ridley Scott, with Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars who grows potatoes to survive, the most voted film of the shelf after Mad Max; The Big Short, by Adam McKay, the story of the investors who bet against the housing market before the crash of 2008, which won for its adapted screenplay; Bridge of Spies, by Steven Spielberg, with Tom Hanks as the lawyer who negotiated an exchange of spies in 1962, which won Mark Rylance the award for best supporting actor; Room, by Lenny Abrahamson, with an 8.0, in which a young mother and her son escape the shed where they have been held for years, an award for Brie Larson; and Brooklyn, by John Crowley, with Saoirse Ronan as an Irish immigrant in the New York of the 1950s.

The ceremony of 2017 is remembered for its ending: the envelope of the wrong category was handed to the presenters, La La Land was announced as the winner, and in the middle of the speeches the producers learned that the award belonged to Moonlight, by Barry Jenkins, the story in three chapters of a young Black man growing up in Miami. Moonlight also won the award for its adapted screenplay and the first of the two supporting awards of Mahershala Ali. La La Land, by Damien Chazelle, with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, a musical about a jazz pianist and an actress in Los Angeles, had received fourteen nominations, equalling the record, and won six, including best director, for a Chazelle of 32, the youngest winner of the award, and best actress for Emma Stone.

The best rated film of the shelf is Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson, with an 8.2, the true story of Desmond Doss, an army medic who refused to carry a weapon and saved dozens of men at Okinawa; it won for its editing and its sound. Hidden Figures, by Theodore Melfi, with an 8.1, tells the story of the three Black women mathematicians whose calculations sent John Glenn into orbit, and Lion, by Garth Davis, with an 8.0, the true story of a man raised in Australia who finds his birth mother in India with the help of Google Earth. Arrival, by Denis Villeneuve, with Amy Adams as a linguist facing alien visitors, won for its sound editing; Manchester by the Sea, by Kenneth Lonergan, won for its screenplay and for Casey Affleck; Fences, directed by and starring Denzel Washington, from the play by August Wilson, won the supporting actress award for Viola Davis; and Hell or High Water, by David Mackenzie, with Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine, is a modern western of two brothers who rob the banks of Texas.

Best Picture, 2018 and 2019

The shelf Best Picture, 2018 and 2019 holds the nine nominees of March 2018, the season of the screeners of the old site, and the eight of February 2019. The winner of 2018 was The Shape of Water, by Guillermo del Toro, with Sally Hawkins as a mute cleaning woman in a secret laboratory of the 1960s who falls in love with an amphibian creature; it led the nominations with thirteen and won four awards, including best director. The best rated nominees of that year, level at 8.1, are two: Call Me by Your Name, by Luca Guadagnino, the summer love of a young man and an older student in northern Italy, whose screenplay won James Ivory, at 89, the oldest competitive winner in the history of the Academy, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, by Martin McDonagh, with Frances McDormand as a mother who rents three billboards to shame the police over the murder of her daughter, which won her the award for best actress and Sam Rockwell the supporting award.

The other nominees of 2018 are some of the defining films of the decade. Get Out, by Jordan Peele, a horror satire of race in America, won the award for original screenplay, the first for a Black writer in that category; Dunkirk, by Christopher Nolan, the evacuation of 1940 told on land, at sea and in the air, won three awards for editing and sound; Darkest Hour, by Joe Wright, won Gary Oldman the award for best actor as Winston Churchill, and its make-up won too; Lady Bird, by Greta Gerwig, with Saoirse Ronan, made Gerwig the fifth woman nominated for best director; Phantom Thread, by Paul Thomas Anderson, with Daniel Day-Lewis as a London couturier, won for its costumes; and The Post, by Steven Spielberg, with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, tells the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

The ceremony of 2019 crowned Green Book, by Peter Farrelly, with an 8.2, the best rated film of the shelf: a working-class bouncer from the Bronx, played by Viggo Mortensen, drives a Black concert pianist, played by Mahershala Ali, through the American South of 1962, a role that won Ali his second award in three years. The most voted film of the shelf is Black Panther, by Ryan Coogler, the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture, which won three awards, for its costumes, its production design and its score. Roma, by Alfonso Cuarón, a memory in black and white of a domestic worker in Mexico City in the early 1970s, was the first Netflix film nominated for Best Picture and won three awards, for director, cinematography and foreign language film.

Bohemian Rhapsody, by Bryan Singer, the story of Queen and Freddie Mercury, won four awards, including best actor for Rami Malek; The Favourite, by Yorgos Lanthimos, a wicked comedy of the court of Queen Anne, won best actress for Olivia Colman; A Star Is Born, directed by Bradley Cooper, with Lady Gaga, won for its song Shallow; BlacKkKlansman, by Spike Lee, the true story of a Black detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s, gave Lee his first competitive award, for its adapted screenplay; and Vice, by Adam McKay, with Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, won for its make-up. The guide The six ceremonies puts all the winners in order.

Best Picture, 2020 and 2021

The shelf Best Picture, 2020 and 2021 holds the nine nominees of February 2020 and the eight of April 2021, and it is the best rated of the three Best Picture shelves, with an average of 7.67 and six films rated 8 or more. Its best rated film is the best rated film of the guide: Parasite, by Bong Joon Ho, with an 8.5, the story of a poor family that slips one by one into the service of a rich one in Seoul, until the house reveals its secret. It made history in February 2020 as the first film in a language other than English to win Best Picture, and it won three more awards, for director, original screenplay and international feature film.

The most voted film of the shelf is Joker, by Todd Phillips, which led the nominations of that year with eleven and won two awards, best actor for Joaquin Phoenix and the score of Hildur Guðnadóttir. The year was rich in great films by great directors: 1917, by Sam Mendes, made to look like a single continuous shot, won for cinematography, visual effects and sound mixing; Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino, won the supporting award of Brad Pitt and the award for production design; Jojo Rabbit, by Taika Waititi, a satire of a boy in the Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend is Hitler himself, won for its adapted screenplay; Ford v Ferrari, by James Mangold, with Matt Damon and Christian Bale, won for its editing and its sound editing; Marriage Story, by Noah Baumbach, won the supporting award of Laura Dern; Little Women, by Greta Gerwig, won for its costumes; and The Irishman, by Martin Scorsese, with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, at 209 minutes the longest film of the guide, received ten nominations and left the ceremony with empty hands.

The ceremony of April 2021, the latest in history, took place at Union Station in Los Angeles, in the middle of the pandemic, and its rules were changed to accept films released online and in the first weeks of 2021. It crowned Nomadland, by Chloé Zhao, with Frances McDormand as a widow who travels the American West in a van after the closing of her town; Zhao became the second woman and the first woman of colour to win best director, and McDormand won her third award for best actress. The Father, by Florian Zeller, with an 8.1, won Anthony Hopkins the award for best actor at 83, the oldest winner of an acting award, for his portrait of a man losing his memory, and it also won for its adapted screenplay.

The other nominees of 2021 were Promising Young Woman, by Emerald Fennell, with Carey Mulligan, which won the award for original screenplay; Sound of Metal, by Darius Marder, with Riz Ahmed as a drummer who loses his hearing, which won for its editing and its sound; Judas and the Black Messiah, by Shaka King, the story of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, which won the supporting award of Daniel Kaluuya; Minari, by Lee Isaac Chung, a Korean family on a farm in Arkansas in the 1980s, which won the supporting award of Youn Yuh-jung; Mank, by David Fincher, in black and white, the story of the screenwriter of Citizen Kane, which won for production design and cinematography; and The Trial of the Chicago 7, by Aaron Sorkin, the trial of the protesters of the convention of 1968.

Animated and international

The second family, Animated and international, gathers the two categories that open the Academy Awards to the rest of the world of cinema: the animated feature, created in 2002, and the international feature film, called foreign language film until 2019. Its 50 films come from France, Japan, Ireland, Denmark, Lebanon, Poland, Hungary, Chile and many other countries, and they hold an average of 7.52. The guide Animated and international sums it up.

Animated features

The shelf Animated features, 2016 to 2018 holds the thirteen most voted of the fifteen nominees of those three years, and it opens with the three winners. Inside Out, by Pete Docter, the most voted film of the shelf, takes place inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl; Zootopia, by Byron Howard and Rich Moore, is a detective story in a city of animals; Coco, by Lee Unkrich, with an 8.2, the best rated film of the shelf, follows a Mexican boy into the Land of the Dead and also won for its song, Remember Me. The other nominees show how wide the category had become: Loving Vincent, with an 8.0, painted in oil frame by frame in the style of Van Gogh; When Marnie Was There, the last film of Studio Ghibli before its pause; My Life as a Zucchini, a Swiss stop-motion film about children in a foster home, at 66 minutes the shortest film of the guide; The Red Turtle, a wordless fable by Michael Dudok de Wit made with Ghibli; Anomalisa, an adult stop-motion drama written by Charlie Kaufman; Kubo and the Two Strings, from the Laika studio; Shaun the Sheep Movie, from Aardman; and Moana, The Boss Baby and Ferdinand.

The shelf Animated features, 2019 to 2021 holds thirteen of the fifteen nominees of the next three years. Its most voted and best rated film is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with an 8.4, the winner of 2019, in which Miles Morales meets the Spider-People of other dimensions, drawn to look like a printed comic book. The winners of 2020 and 2021 were both from Pixar: Toy Story 4, which ended the saga of Woody and Buzz, and Soul, by Pete Docter, with an 8.1, the story of a jazz musician who falls into the world before birth, which also won for its score. Klaus, which with I Lost My Body gave Netflix its first nominations in the category, and Wolfwalkers, by Tomm Moore of the Irish Cartoon Saloon, both carry an 8.2; I Lost My Body, a French film about a severed hand that searches the city for its owner, the first animated film to win the main prize of the Critics' Week at Cannes; Isle of Dogs, by Wes Anderson; Incredibles 2; How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World; Onward; Over the Moon, the first film directed by the Disney animator Glen Keane; Ralph Breaks the Internet and Missing Link complete it.

International features

The shelf International features, 2016 to 2018 holds thirteen of the fifteen nominees of those years, among them the three winners. Son of Saul, by László Nemes, the winner of 2016, follows a Jewish prisoner forced to work in the crematoria of Auschwitz in a single day, filmed close to his face; The Salesman, by Asghar Farhadi, the winner of 2017, is a drama of a married couple in Tehran, and Farhadi stayed away from the ceremony in protest against the American travel ban; A Fantastic Woman, by Sebastián Lelio, the winner of 2018, with Daniela Vega as a trans woman in Santiago who mourns her partner. The best rated films of the shelf, level at 7.8, are Land of Mine, by Martin Zandvliet, the story of young German prisoners forced to clear the mines on the beaches of Denmark in 1945, and, just behind, Mustang, by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, five sisters in a Turkish village, and Embrace of the Serpent, by Ciro Guerra, a journey up the Amazon in black and white, both at 7.7. The most voted is The Square, by Ruben Östlund, a satire of the art world that had won the Palme d'Or; A Man Called Ove, Toni Erdmann, Loveless, On Body and Soul, The Insult and A War complete it.

The shelf International features, 2019 to 2021 holds the eleven nominees of those years outside the Best Picture shelves, since the winners Roma and Parasite were nominated for the top award too. Its most voted film is Another Round, by Thomas Vinterberg, the winner of 2021, with Mads Mikkelsen as one of four teachers who test the theory that life is better with a little alcohol in the blood. The best rated, level at 8.1, are Capernaum, by Nadine Labaki, a Lebanese boy who sues his parents for giving him life, and Better Days, by Derek Tsang, a story of bullying before the university exam in China. Shoplifters, by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the Palme d'Or of 2018, follows a family of small thieves in Tokyo; Cold War, by Paweł Pawlikowski, a love story across the Iron Curtain in black and white; Pain and Glory, by Pedro Almodóvar, with Antonio Banderas as an ageing director; Les Misérables, by Ladj Ly, a day of tension in the suburbs of Paris; the German drama of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck about a painter haunted by the past, Corpus Christi, Quo Vadis, Aida? and The Man Who Sold His Skin complete it.

Performances and crafts

The third family, Performances and crafts, is the largest of the guide, with 65 films and about 595,000 votes. It gathers the films that reached the Academy Awards through one great performance or one great craft rather than through the top award: the actors and actresses of films outside the Best Picture race, the spectacles nominated for their visual effects, and the films honoured for their screenplays, songs, sound, costumes and make-up. The guide Performances and crafts sums it up.

Great performances

The shelf Great performances, 2016 to 2018 holds thirteen films nominated for acting at the ceremonies of 2016 to 2018. Two of their performances won: Alicia Vikander, as the wife of the painter Lili Elbe, one of the first people to have gender reassignment surgery, in The Danish Girl, with Eddie Redmayne, and Allison Janney, as the ferocious mother of the skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, with Margot Robbie. The most voted film of the shelf is The Hateful Eight, by Quentin Tarantino, a western in a snowbound haberdashery nominated for Jennifer Jason Leigh, which won Ennio Morricone his first competitive award for its score. The best rated is Captain Fantastic, with a 7.9, in which Viggo Mortensen raises his six children in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The other nominated performances of the shelf are those of Sylvester Stallone, who returned as Rocky Balboa in Creed, by Ryan Coogler; Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Carol, by Todd Haynes, a love story in the New York of the 1950s; Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs, by Danny Boyle; Jennifer Lawrence as the inventor of a mop in Joy; Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals, by Tom Ford; Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy in Jackie; Isabelle Huppert in Elle, by Paul Verhoeven; Willem Dafoe as the manager of a cheap motel near Disney World in The Florida Project, by Sean Baker; and Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, by Ridley Scott, who stepped into the role of J. Paul Getty a few weeks before the release when the film was reshot.

The shelf Great performances, 2019 to 2021 holds thirteen films nominated for acting at the next three ceremonies. Two of them won: Regina King, as the mother of a young woman whose fiancé is falsely accused, in If Beale Street Could Talk, by Barry Jenkins, and Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in her last concerts in London, in Judy. The most voted is Bombshell, by Jay Roach, with Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie as the women of Fox News who brought down its chairman, which won for its make-up, and the best rated is The Two Popes, by Fernando Meirelles, with a 7.5, an imagined dialogue between Pope Benedict and the future Pope Francis, played by Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce.

Glenn Close has two films here, The Wife, of 2017, as the wife of a writer about to receive the Nobel Prize, and Hillbilly Elegy, of 2020, as a tough grandmother from Kentucky, both nominated. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, with Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his last role, nominated after his death, won for its costumes and make-up; Can You Ever Forgive Me?, with Melissa McCarthy as a writer who forges letters of famous authors, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, with Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, are both by Marielle Heller. At Eternity's Gate, with Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh; Richard Jewell, by Clint Eastwood, nominated for Kathy Bates; Pieces of a Woman, with Vanessa Kirby; and the second Borat film, with Maria Bakalova as the daughter of the reporter, complete it.

Visual effects

The shelf Visual effects, 2016 to 2021 holds the thirteen most voted films nominated only for their visual effects and crafts, and it is the most voted shelf of the guide, with about 247,000 votes. Two of its films won: Ex Machina, by Alex Garland, a small film about an artificial woman whose effects beat the great spectacles of 2016, and Blade Runner 2049, by Denis Villeneuve, which also won Roger Deakins his first award for cinematography after thirteen nominations; Tenet, by Christopher Nolan, the winner of 2021, completes the trio of winners here.

The rest of the shelf is a portrait of the blockbuster of the late 2010s. Avengers: Infinity War, the most voted film of the guide, and Avengers: Endgame, both with an 8.2, by Anthony and Joe Russo, Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 represent Marvel; four of the five Star Wars films of the period, from Star Wars: The Force Awakens to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, represent Lucasfilm; and Ready Player One, by Steven Spielberg, and Kong: Skull Island complete it.

Screenplays and crafts

The shelf Screenplays and crafts, 2016 to 2018 holds thirteen films nominated for their writing, music, sound, costumes or make-up. Two won: Suicide Squad, the most voted film of the shelf, for its make-up, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, for its costumes. Logan, by James Mangold, with Hugh Jackman as an ageing Wolverine, was the first superhero film nominated for a screenplay; The Lobster, by Yorgos Lanthimos, a satire in which single people must find a partner or be turned into animals, was nominated for its original screenplay; Wonder, with an 8.1, the best rated film of the shelf, for its make-up; The Greatest Showman for its song This Is Me; Baby Driver, by Edgar Wright, for its editing and sound; and Sicario, by Denis Villeneuve, for its cinematography, score and sound. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Passengers, Sully and Star Trek Beyond complete it.

The shelf Screenplays and crafts, 2019 to 2021 holds thirteen more. Rocketman, the life of Elton John with Taron Egerton, won for its song; Knives Out, by Rian Johnson, with Daniel Craig as a detective with a Southern drawl, the best rated film of the shelf with a 7.8, was nominated for its original screenplay; A Quiet Place, the most voted, for its sound editing; The Lighthouse, by Robert Eggers, for its black and white cinematography; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, by the Coen brothers, a western in six chapters, for its screenplay, song and costumes; and Mary Poppins Returns, a candidate in four categories. Frozen II, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, Greyhound, Emma, News of the World, Mary Queen of Scots and the Italian Pinocchio of Matteo Garrone complete it.

The streamers arrive

The six ceremonies of the guide are also the story of the arrival of the streaming services in the awards race. In 2017, Manchester by the Sea, bought at the Sundance festival by Amazon Studios, became the first film released by a streaming service to be nominated for Best Picture, and Casey Affleck won the award for best actor. Two years later, Netflix reached the top category with Roma, which won three awards, including best director for Alfonso Cuarón. In 2020 Netflix had two Best Picture nominees, The Irishman and Marriage Story, and two animated nominees, Klaus and I Lost My Body; in 2021, when the cinemas were closed by the pandemic and the Academy accepted films released directly online, Netflix led the nominations with Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Pieces of a Woman, Hillbilly Elegy and the animated Over the Moon, and Amazon was there with Sound of Metal and the second Borat film.

The screeners themselves changed in those years. The DVDs mailed to the voters, with their watermarks and warnings, gave way to secure streaming links on a platform run by the Academy, and the season of the screeners that the old SeeHD page listed in 2018 was one of the last in which the mailbox still mattered more than the browser. The guide A season of screeners tells that change in more detail.

A wider Academy

The first ceremony of the guide, in February 2016, took place under the banner of a protest. For the second year running all twenty nominees in the acting categories were white, and the hashtag OscarsSoWhite, started a year earlier by the activist April Reign, spread across the industry; some stars stayed away from the ceremony, and the host, Chris Rock, made it the subject of his opening monologue. The Academy answered with a plan to double the number of women and members from under-represented groups by 2020, and it invited hundreds of new members from around the world every year.

The results are visible in the shelves of the guide. The next year Moonlight won Best Picture, and Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis and the writers of Moonlight won their awards; Get Out won the original screenplay award in 2018, Black Panther became the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture in 2019, Parasite won in 2020, and in 2021 Chloé Zhao, Youn Yuh-jung and Daniel Kaluuya won. The international features and the animated films, from Lebanon, Poland, Japan and Ireland, reflect the same opening. The guide Records of the season lists the firsts of those years.

The campaigns

A nomination is rarely an accident. Each autumn the studios plan their campaigns like elections, with advertisements headed For Your Consideration in the trade papers, private screenings followed by questions and answers with the director, dinners and receptions for the voters, and, of course, the screeners. The campaign of Parasite in the winter of 2019 became a model of its kind: Bong Joon Ho travelled across the United States for months with his interpreter, Sharon Choi, answering questions at hundreds of events and winning over voters one screening at a time, until the film that had opened in a handful of American cinemas in October took the top award, and the subtitles that many viewers had feared became part of its charm. Smaller films of the guide, from Moonlight to Minari, rode the same kind of patient campaign from the festivals of the autumn to the night of the awards.

The six winners

The collection The six winners gathers the six films that won Best Picture at the ceremonies of the guide, in order: Spotlight, in 2016, a newspaper investigation; Moonlight, in 2017, a coming of age in three chapters; The Shape of Water, in 2018, a fairy tale of the Cold War; Green Book, in 2019, a road trip through the segregated South; Parasite, in 2020, a Korean satire of class; and Nomadland, in 2021, a portrait of the nomads of the American West. Together they hold an average of 7.71, and they show a slow opening of the Academy, which from 2016 onwards invited many new members from outside the United States and from groups long under-represented among its voters.

Screeners of 2018

The collection Screeners of 2018 gathers the 30 films of the guide nominated at the ceremony of March 2018, the season of the screeners page of the old site: the nine nominees for Best Picture, from The Shape of Water to Get Out and Dunkirk, the animated features from Coco to Loving Vincent, the international features from A Fantastic Woman to The Square, the acting nominees from I, Tonya to The Florida Project, the effects of Blade Runner 2049 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the crafts of Logan, Baby Driver and The Greatest Showman. It is a snapshot of one season, the films that a voter would have found in the mailbox in the winter of 2017. The guide A season of screeners tells how the screeners work.

SeeHD in figures

The 166 films of the guide carry about 1.36 million votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.4, and 24 of them reach 8 or more; the collection Rated 7.5 or more gathers the 81 films rated 7.5 or more, best first, from Parasite to the films at 7.5. The most voted are Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Joker, Mad Max: Fury Road, Black Panther and Doctor Strange. Together the films last about 19,900 minutes, more than 330 hours; the longest is The Irishman, at 209 minutes, followed by The Hateful Eight and the German drama of 2018 by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, at 188 each, and the shortest is My Life as a Zucchini, at 66. 134 of the films are in English, seven in French, four in Spanish and three in Danish, and the others in Japanese, Arabic, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, German, Korean, Turkish, Persian and other languages. The guide The figures gathers every number, and the guide Records of the season lists the records set at the six ceremonies, from the youngest winner for best director to the oldest winner of an acting award.

The directors

Several directors return across the six ceremonies. Denis Villeneuve has three films in the guide, Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049; Greta Gerwig two, Lady Bird and Little Women, both nominated for Best Picture; Barry Jenkins two, Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk; Steven Spielberg three, Bridge of Spies, The Post and Ready Player One; Adam McKay two, The Big Short and Vice; Ridley Scott two, The Martian and All the Money in the World; Christopher Nolan two, Dunkirk and Tenet; Marielle Heller two; and Yorgos Lanthimos two, The Lobster and The Favourite. The guide The directors lists them all.

Where to begin

For a first evening, choose one film from each family: Parasite or Moonlight for Best Picture, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or Capernaum for the animated and international films, and Captain Fantastic or Knives Out for the performances and crafts. For a marathon, watch the six winners in order and follow the changes of six years of the Academy. For a season of your own, pick one ceremony and watch its nominees before reading who won, as the voters did. And for a contrast, pair two films of the same director in two categories, such as Arrival in Best Picture and Blade Runner 2049 in visual effects, both by Denis Villeneuve, or Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, both by Barry Jenkins.

How to use SeeHD

The home page opens with the introduction under a blue bar and then the main column of shelves, with the Trending panel on the right, which lists the twelve shelves with their family and their number of films; a shelf leads to its row further down. Each row sits under a blue bar with a See all button that opens the full shelf, and the posters sit in white boxes with a black strip that names the category and the year of the ceremony. On a phone, the panel moves above the rows. The menu at the top leads to the three families, and the search box finds any film by its title; the guide Search tips explains how.

The film page has the English synopsis, the cast, the director, the genres and the release date. The Watch now button opens the film on JustWatch, which shows the services that offer it in your country, and the button Add to My List keeps it in My list, stored in your browser. The guide How to use SeeHD explains each part, and the guide The Watch now button explains how JustWatch works.

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