8 Years Later, Netflix’s Controversial Best Picture Winner Is a Streaming Hit.

The Academy Awards have undergone drastic changes in the last 10 years, a product of their increased and diversified voting body that includes more young, female, and international members. This alteration of the Academy’s landscape has been demonstrated by the movies they’ve honored in the coveted Best Picture category, which has featured unconventional winners like Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Anora — indie and mid-budget productions about people and stories marginalized in mainstream cinema.

In the big picture of the Oscars, Green Book is a familiar kind of Best Picture winner, but when compared to its era, Peter Farrelly’s biographical dramedy about a working-class Italian-American transporting an African-American pianist through the segregated South in the 1960s sticks out like a sore thumb. Even worse, its simplistic portrait of race relations and reliance on white savior tropes have left a bad taste in the mouth of many viewers.