Netflix bets its Oscar future on a queer Spanish film about love, war and Federico García Lorca

Netflix has spent a decade building what Variety calls Hollywood's most expensive awards machine — the Sunset Strip billboards, the designer screening rooms, the elite tastemaker dinners — and collected a shelf of Best Picture nominations without ever winning the top prize. La Bola Negra, a Spanish-language queer historical film that swept through Cannes and Toronto this year, may be the film that finally changes that.

Spain's Film Academy has selected La Bola Negra as the country's entry for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards, to be held on March 14, 2027. But the film's ambitions — and Netflix's — reach well beyond that category. According to Variety's Oscar forecasts, the film could land as many as seven nominations including Best Picture, International Feature, and Adapted Screenplay. The Hollywood Reporter goes further still, projecting up to 14 nominations, with directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi breaking into the directing race, Penélope Cruz contending for supporting actress, and the film performing strongly across technical categories.

The film premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 21, 2026, earning Calvo and Ambrossi — affectionately known in Spain as 'Los Javis' — the Best Director Award. Its festival run continued at Toronto and San Sebastián. A competitive bidding war followed Cannes, which Netflix won, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The film is a triptych — three interlocking stories spanning 1932, 1937, and 2017 — united by a manuscript, a lineage of queer men, and the shadow of Federico García Lorca. In pre-Civil War Granada, a young man from a wealthy family is blackballed from an exclusive social club after members vote against his admission over rumors of his homosexuality — the 'black ball' of the title. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, a young Nationalist soldier named Sebastián is assigned to guard a wounded Republican prisoner, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, who had been Lorca's lover and a member of his theatre company, La Barraca. As Sebastián grows closer to Rafael, his own homosexual desire awakens; Rafael's dying request is that Sebastián recover a manuscript of Lorca's unfinished play. In 2017, a historian named Alberto discovers that manuscript as part of an inheritance from his estranged grandfather — who turns out to be Sebastián, who spent his life in the countryside with another man while letting neighbors believe they were cousins.

The screenplay, co-written by Los Javis and Alberto Conejero, draws on two source texts: the four surviving pages of Lorca's own unfinished work of the same name, and Conejero's play La piedra oscura, which informs the 1937 wartime storyline. The 2017 thread draws partly from Conejero's own life — the lead character, a writer and playwright researching queer dissidence in Greek music, shares his first name, Alberto, by design, according to Conejero's own statements.

The ensemble cast includes Guitarricadelafuente in his acting debut, Miguel Bernardeau, Carlos González, Milo Quifes, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz, and Glenn Close, with an extensive list of cameo appearances. The film was produced by Movistar Plus+ alongside Suma Content, El Deseo, and Le Pacte. It scored a strong box office performance domestically in Spain upon its September 25, 2026 theatrical release.

Lisa asked us whether we were willing to give this everything we had, and we said yes, that we would leave nothing on the table. We know it's going to be tough. We'll be living out of a suitcase for months. But we're excited to do it, not just because of the possibility of nominations, but because we want the film and its message to reach as many people as possible.— Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, directors

The Lisa they refer to is Lisa Taback, Netflix's vice president for Talent Relations and Awards, who trained at Miramax and helped steer the campaigns of films including The King's Speech and The Artist. She is also credited with steadying Netflix's U.S. push for Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez when controversy over past social media posts by its star threatened to derail the campaign, according to El País.

Until today, I hadn't allowed myself to think about categories beyond international feature. Today, I'm allowing myself the luxury of believing it's possible. The message we've received from Netflix is that the film's greatest strength is that it's the future.— Javier Ambrossi, director

despite being about the past.— Javier Calvo, director

Netflix is giving the film an extended theatrical window, with U.S. and Canadian streaming beginning in December, according to reports. The awards campaign is expected to involve significantly more than the 40 publicists deployed for Oliver Laxe's Sirât last year, according to El País.

Producer Jorge Pezzi, who was head of Fiction and Partnerships at Movistar Plus+ when the project began and later became CEO of Suma Content — the production company founded by Los Javis — is leading the campaign alongside Netflix U.S. Pezzi also worked on Sirât's Oscar campaign, which received predictions of up to eight nominations before ultimately earning two, and he urges caution.

We need to be cautious. People are already taking nominations for granted, and you never know. With Sirât, some predictions had us getting as many as eight nominations, and in the end we got two. That said, La Bola Negra will benefit from a team that lives and works in the United States. To succeed at the Oscars, you need people who understand the process from the inside because it's a highly sophisticated machine.— Jorge Pezzi, producer

The directors cite The English Patient and Titanic as touchstones and note that audiences and critics have responded to the film's classical scale. 'A lot of people praise the film's classical sensibility,' Calvo told El País. 'We're told it's the kind of film they don't make anymore.' El País notes that no Spanish film has entered international awards season from a comparable position of strength, with only Juan Antonio Bayona's Society of the Snow and Oliver Laxe's Sirât coming close in recent years.

The road ahead is not clear. El País notes that several major contenders have yet to fully enter the awards conversation, including Alejandro González Iñárritu's Digger starring Tom Cruise, Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Three, David Fincher's The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth written by Quentin Tarantino and starring Brad Pitt, Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, and Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning. El País also points out that recent Best Picture winners including Oppenheimer and One Battle After Another did not rely on launches at major European festivals. After Spain, the film's festival tour continues with stops at Rome, New York, London, and Morelia.

Why it matters — If La Bola Negra wins Best Picture, it would be the first time Netflix has claimed the Academy's top prize and the first Spanish-language film to do so since the category was introduced — a milestone for streaming, for Spanish cinema, and for queer storytelling on a global stage.

Reported by hollywoodreporter.com, netflix.com, variety.com, en.wikipedia.org, english.elpais.com