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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.
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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We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Despite Trouble the Water’s high ratings - and one of this year’s festival darlings - no one has read the film for what it is: the most contrived, over the top, get-behind-the-issue/cause docs of the century. It is the exemplar of the new mold of self-righteous docs. It’s a given that the directors completely fucked-up what could have been a truly troublesome, complicated metaphorical story about recovery and transformation - both of a city and a person (or couple, in this case). But it’s not a given that the directing duo (and their editor) imitate what’s been happening in U.S. docs since the birth of Roger and Me: the unnecessary intercuts of sloppy, heavy-handed and manufactured cheap shots ruminating throughout the film (e.g., Bush comments, “uppity-White people” in the French Quarter declaring a rise in tourist and a comeback for the city, and a propaganda laden, “lead-the-audience” storyline about its main characters while hiding their backstory).
The directors’ point of view is based in identity politics, where they, as “white people of privilege” (gag me!), feel a “duty” to represent “people of color” (read, “underprivileged”) in a “responsible” way (read, “condescending”), given the historical connotations and representations of people of color in the past and present. The directors’ story amounts to nothing more than a hybrid of a gritty and slick slung together images that fondle self-identified progressives and liberals in all the right ways (in other words, the directors found the “L-Spot”). Rather than “doing the right thing,” Trouble the Water “does the righteous thing.” They go for the political gut of tapping into 8 years of disgust with the Bush administration and target “America” as the true victim (“It’s not about a storm. It’s about America”).
Throughout Trouble the Water, the directors deliberately leave out their leading and baited questions and, instead, leave in the responses they wanted to obtain from the characters. Their film is told completely from the point of view of the directors. Additionally, the characters respond with what they think the directors want to hear (”Bush is Bad” - everyone clap, “Let’s rap” - everyone cheer; “Return to the Scene of the Crime” - everyone feel righteous anger and sadness by reliving the collective trauma of loss). It’s the worst piece of recycled “noble heroin” story – a form of micro-righteousness that lacks the strength, depth, and honesty to explore deeper stories that will eventually tell themselves. Self-righteous films, instead, simply reconfirm what the directors (and programmers) already believe. They reinforce narrow mindedness while simultaneously reinscribe political docs as the standard by which to evaluate documentaries. They become the new norm.
Trouble the Water is the epitome of such a film as norm. It speaks to shared political ideologies which go on to win awards thus fueling the new era of righteous films in a post-fascist manner: The Garden, Fuel, Pray the Devil, Operation Homecoming, An Inconveinent Truth, etc. These issue based docs reconfirm political and lifestyle identities (or at least how the directors and programmers would like other people to see life in an Alfred Schutz sort of way). These self-righteous films are made for people who want to see their ideologies on the screen, to re-inscribe their beliefs, clap when they’re recognize them, and then praise it after they leave because reinforces their world view. These films are recognized for what they do instead of how they do what they try to do. Most of all, they lack courage to truly explore.
Self-righteous docs do nothing to advance storytelling, nor do they truly challenge audiences. There is little room for storytelling - trumped by political docs that focus on “conscience raising,” “changing people’s minds,” and/or “activist films.” Where are the men and women docs that truly walk on a tightrope to the end of the world? Where are the daring and different films instead of safe and conservative ones that try to maximize the “audience award” syndrome? Today’s climate of documentaries is issue based that appeal to the masses in the worst possible way: through populism.
Man on Wire truly inspires a new form of creativity that transcends the actual documentary and the story. It is transcendental in old fashioned modernist ways. It’s too bad almost all the “major” doc festivals have jumped in bed with politics and equated documentary with advancing political points of views. Why haven’t any right wing nonsense docs ever been nominated? Take Expelled, for instance. At least it doesn’t disguise their politics the way in which the liberal films do. Then again, what’s the difference between Expelled and Trouble the Water, Fuel, or the many other issue based docs?
“Enough!” as Zizek would say. Off with their heads! The revolution in documentary is now the dominant, suffocating ideology, and Full Frame, Silverdocs, IDFA, Hot-Docs, Tribeca, and to some degree, Sundance are all paving the road of homogeneity with political intentions. Politics trump story.
Religulous was snubbed… shocking!
An interesting read - some good tips here