When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces a shortlist for one of its Oscar categories, many critics immediately focus on what titles are missing. Religulous was snubbed! Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired was punished for having a “secret” qualifying run! The Academy’s rules for eligibility must be amended! Such reactions were seen all over the web last week as awards season pundits looked at the narrowed-down list of 15 Feature Documentary hopefuls and criticized the Academy for its omissions.
But the better response (which is the one SpoutBlog had) is to primarily address and celebrate the included films, not just for being contenders for the Feature Documentary Oscar but also for being showcased in general. The wonderful thing about shortlists is that they expand further the idea that it’s great just to be nominated. For feature documentaries, particularly those without a lot of media and major distributor attention, it is also great just to be shortlisted. Non-fiction film fans may now see this as an opportunity to take note of some documentaries that weren’t previously on their radar (unfortunately none of these films are actually allowed to advertise their recent achievement of being shortlisted).
But the Academy Awards are, of course, still a competition. So, while we take notice of the 15 semi-finalists for the Feature Documentary Oscar, we shall also weigh their chances of being selected for the final five and predict which titles are likely to be announced as nominees on January 22.
1. Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
It’s a constant joke that any film related to the Holocaust is guaranteed an Oscar nomination. Obviously this is a generalization based on common trend, and not every Holocaust doc has in fact been recognized by the Academy, but if such a film is good enough to reach the shortlist, there is a very good chance that it will also be nominated. And since there hasn’t been a feature doc on the subject nominated since 2002, it’s probably time for a new one to get the spotlight. Blessed is narrated by Oscar-nominee Joan Allen and details the courageous life of Hannah Senesh, who took part in a mission to rescue Hungary’s Jews. If Hollywood doesn’t nominate this doc, it will probably at least use it as a springboard from which to produce an Oscar-bait dramatization about Senesh in the near future.
2. Trouble the Water
Never mind the fact that it’s one of the best-reviewed films of the year, this is the Academy’s first chance to get behind the Katrina issue. Though some mistakenly see the Feature Documentary Oscar as primarily a category with which to showcase its favored causes rather than recognizing the actual best documentary filmmaking of the year, there is a miniscule amount of truth in the matter. It’s part of the reason that the Holocaust-doc joke is so often made, and it’s also why the films Born Into Brothels and An Inconvenient Truth were named winners, despite their being subject-over-style kinds of documentaries. Trouble the Water is a tad bit sloppy, but it has the subject matter and enough inspirational substance to receive a nomination.
3. Encounters at the End of the World
This may be the Academy’s chance to make up for their exclusion of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man a few years back or simply honor a filmmaker who has been important to the non-fiction genre for decades. Also, with their snub of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the Academy Documentary Branch could use this as more opportunity to distinguish and make an example out of the difference between a theatrical documentary and a television documentary (as David Poland recently pointed out, “if you are a TV doc, be a TV doc…if you are a theatrical doc, that is what the Oscars reward”). People who went to see Encounters recommended it on the basis that it needs to be seen on a big screen, which is not often said about documentaries. Other things it has going for it are a shared location with Oscar-winner March of the Penguins (even if Herzog starts the film addressing that this is not like that film) and a slight relevance to the global warming issue, which is one of the Academy’s currently favored issues.
4. Standard Operating Procedure
The Academy Documentary Branch does seem to favor former nominees in their category, perhaps due to the number of documentarians who turn to fiction filmmaking after breaking out in non-fiction (maybe that explains their snub of Barbara Kopple recently after her attempt into fiction). So Morris, who was infamously rejected by the Academy with his monumental film The Thin Blue Line, and who later won the Oscar for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons Learned from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, should be given another go. It also helps that Standard Operating Procedure is the sole Iraq War-relevant documentary in the bunch, an interesting fact given how many films dealing with this topic have been shortlisted in the past few years. Even though last year the Oscar was given to a similarly themed doc about torture and prisoner abuse, the issue is likely still one that the Academy feels strongly about. Of course, speaking of that film, Taxi to the Dark Side, its director’s latest film was not shortlisted.
5. Man on Wire
This is the highest grossing (and best-reviewed) of the 15 shortlisted films, and that could mean a lot, even if it is only the fifth top grossing doc of the year. The Academy is hardly a sucker for popular documentaries, but most years since Michael Moore was honored in 2002 have seen at least one popular doc, such as Super Size Me, March of the Penguins and Moore’s Sicko. In fact, only four of the ten top grossing (non-IMAX, non-concert, non-compilation, non-reality TV-based) documentaries have not been nominated for an Oscar. The only drawback for Man on Wire could be that it features a very large percentage of re-enactment or dramatization, and even if the Academy’s rules have a greater permission for these kinds of documentaries than in the days of The Thin Blue Line’s snub, it’s very possible that members of the Academy Documentary Branch are more appreciable towards one of the films that aren’t so heavily dependent on re-enactments.
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