The 97th Academy Awards are on Sunday, March 2, and it’s no surprise if they’ve got you in a movie night mood. Over the years, the Oscars have largely reserved the most prestigious awards for dramas and romances, but as sci-fi storytelling has grown more provocative and prescient, sci-fi flicks have slowly permeated beyond the technical awards and into the Best Picture category. Case in point: Dune: Part Two was nominated for five awards, including Best Picture.
Streaming services have made it easier than ever to see the Oscar nominees before the big night, but they’ve also provided a great resource to enjoy Oscar winners of years past. Whether you’re a sci-fi aficionado or you’re simply in the mood, these are 5 great Oscar-winning sci-fi movies you should stream right now.
After the fallout from the Harkonnen attack on House Atreides, Paul (Timothée Chalamet) has fully assimilated with wife Chani (Zendaya) and the Fremen of the desert. As Paul taps deeper into his gifts of foresight and begins to pave a divine destiny to preserve the fate of the known universe, he’s forced to make sacrifices and put himself in harm’s way to repel a Harkonnen onslaught.
One of the first great sci-fi movies, 1954’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea won Best Special Effects and Best Art Direction Oscars.
The beloved film adapts Jules Verne’s classic novel of the same name, in which Captain Nemo (Kirk Douglas) and his crew aboard the submarine Nautilus descend to the depths of the ocean to investigate a wave of mysterious sinkings. The mission encounters a monster unlike any the men are prepared to face. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is streaming on Disney+.
Widely considered one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of legendary director Stanley Kubrick‘s defining films. A meditation on human destiny, Kubrick’s odyssey famously begins with our prehistoric ape ancestry before leaping millennia into a future in which humans have colonized space.
As astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) ventures into uncharted space, time, mortality, and infinity all become merely guidelines, not facts. 2001: A Space Odyssey is streaming on Max now.
A cultural phenomenon upon its release in 2009, Avatar went beyond becoming the highest-grossing film of all-time to nine Oscar nominations and three wins. (2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water had similar box office success but less critical acclaim.) Essentially a reimagining of the Pocahontas story, Avatar takes place in the 22nd century on the distant moon of Pandora, where humans have started a mining colony despite the resistance of the local populace.
To study these people, the Na’vi, human scientists have created “avatars,” allowing them to move their consciousness into a Na’vi body. But after countless failures to truly connect with these people, a paraplegic Marine (Sam Worthington) finally makes inroads when he connects with a chieftain’s daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). Avatar is streaming on Hulu now.
The biggest winner at the 2023 Oscars, Everything Everywhere All at Once, became one of the most awarded films ever, with wins for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and acting awards for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis. The genre-bending story follows Evelyn Wang (Yeoh), a flustered immigrant mother struggling in her relationships with her family and to keep their laundromat business afloat amid an IRS audit.
When she’s contacted from a parallel universe and told that only she can save the world, she’s initially resistant, but she soon learns to channel her newfound powers to navigate through splintering timelines and tie them back together.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.