Streaming services are spending bank on big-budget movies. That's not buying Oscar nods.

• Streaming services came up short at this year's Oscar nominations, announced on Tuesday.
• Netflix, which led the nominations last year with 27, fell to 15 this year.
• It could reflect shifting streaming priorities for media and tech companies.

A year after Apple became the first streaming company to win the best picture Oscar, streamers came up short in this year's Oscar nominations that were announced on Tuesday.

Netflix led the nominations last year with 27 nods. This year, it only has 15 — nine of which were for its one best-picture contender, "All Quiet on the Western Front."

Apple, 2022's big winner, garnered just two nominations: one for the animated short film "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse" and a supporting actor nod for Brian Tyree Henry in "Causeway." Its biggest awards-season contender, Will Smith's "Emancipation," didn't receive a single nomination.

Amazon received one nomination, for international feature, and Disney+ landed a nomination for animated short. (Disney, the studio, led the nominations with 22 nods.)

The nominations reflect a year in which Hollywood studios largely recommitted to movie theaters — albeit with shortened theatrical windows — after experimenting with streaming releases in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic.

The combined North American box office of this year's best-picture nominees is the highest, at the point of the nominations, since 2009's group of best-picture contenders, according to Comscore. It comes after a drought in blockbuster nominees and dwindling Oscars ratings over the last two years.

Box office hits like "Avatar: The Way of Water," "Top Gun: Maverick," and the indie darling "Everything Everywhere All at Once" were all nominated for best picture on Tuesday.

But the nominations also reflect the shifting streaming priorities for media and tech companies coming out of the pandemic.

Streamers may not care as much about the Oscars

Netflix has typically been a big spender on the Oscars.

It first broke into the best-picture race in 2018 with "Roma." Variety reported that the company spent $25 million on its Oscars campaign for the film. For the following year's Oscars, when "The Irishman" and "Marriage Story" were both up for best picture, the New York Times reported that Netflix spent $70 million campaigning.

But the company the Oscars' top award has continually eluded the streamer, including last year when "The Power of the Dog" led in nominations but lost the biggest prize to Apple's "CODA."

Netflix is coming off a 2022 in which it laid off hundreds of employees, lost subscribers in the first two quarters of the year, and grappled with slowing revenue growth.

After a year of unprecedented struggles for the company, trying to win that elusive best-picture prize may not be as much of a priority as giving its subscribers the kind of content they crave. After all, there's rarely overlap between Netflix's most-watched films and its best-picture nominees.

The company released some of its biggest content of all time in 2022, including four of its top 10 most-watched films ever. Only one of those four movies got an Oscar nomination — an adapted screenplay nod for "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery."

Netflix's 2023 movie preview, which it released last week, lacked the sort of auteur-driven passion projects that catapulted the company into Oscar consideration in recent years. It instead leaned into sequels to hits like "Murder Mystery" and "Extraction," and big-budget franchise-starters like Zack Snyder's "Rebel Moon."

That's not to say Netflix will completely give up on the Oscars. It plans to release prestige movies this year like David Fincher's "The Killer" and Bradley Cooper's "Maestro." But the awards race may not be a top priority going forward.

Meanwhile, Apple has already won its best-picture prize, and it will likely have another major contender this year with Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon."

But movies are not and will never be its main business. They're just another offering in the larger Apple ecosystem; if they bring more consumers into the company's subscriptions business, that's a win

The same can be said for Amazon, which has appeared to largely abandon a robust theatrical strategy in favor of straight-to-streaming action movies like "The Tomorrow War" and "Without Remorse," as well as big-budget TV shows like "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power."

Overall, the Oscars may become a nice cherry on top for streamers, rather than something to passionately pursue.