I mean, Spielberg can make a low-budget arty movie and distribute it very cheaply just like anyone else can. The idea that he has to spend a lot of money and release it to a bunch of theaters is an artificial constraint that he has apparently imposed on himself. Cuarón’s last movie before Roma had a $100+ million budget, so what’s Spielberg’s excuse?
If the Academy wants to honor cinematic art, it should probably ignore irrelevant things like the economics of film distribution. If it wants to simply be a mouthpiece for monied interests in the film industry (I think it obviously wants to be some of both), then by all means they can make this change. But they should not be surprised when it hastens their descent into cultural irrelevance.
A few people have tried to draw a distinction between things that are “made for the big screen” vs “made for the small screen”, but I can’t think of any actual feature of movies to hang that on. Theater and streaming movie production both use the same cinematic filming equipment, and the product is released in the same resolution.
The viewing experience I can build in my house with a budget of about $1000 is significantly better than the one at most of the theaters I went to for decades. Black out curtains simply aren’t that expensive, and TVs are amazing these days.
Hell, if you want to see a movie in an immersive environment, putting some headphones on and your phone in one of those head-mounted racks that blocks out the rest of the world can be done for even less.