Still a bit fuzzy on the recent changes to the Academy’s qualifying rules for a Best Documentary Feature nomination? Yeah, join the club––I had to look up this post from last October as a bit of a refresher. The biggest change, is that films are required to complete a seven-day run in both Los Angeles and Manhattan before August 31. So once again, the IDA has put together a mini-documentary festival later this month in Los Angeles to help a number of films make that milestone.

It seems to be a pretty diverse list, although maybe I’m not one to judge––the only title I’ve actually seen is Terrence Davies’ Of Time and the City, although I recognize others, such as Ellen Kuras’ Nerakhoon, and the Slamdance hit Dear Zachary. In any case, the full list is after the jump. DocuWeek runs from August 22-28 in Los Angeles.

Via The Circuit.
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• The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has invited 105 member of the industry to join their gang, including 2008 Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Diablo Cody. Insert stripper to Hollywood establishment joke…here.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg presented “clips, storyboards and early animation sequences from” several Dreamworks animation films in the works at the CinemaExpo in Amsterdam this week, as part of a push to convince European theater owners to convert to digital projection systems.
• The English Surgeon, The Garden, and Throw Down Your Heart won big at the SilverDocs film festival. For our SilverDocs coverage, click here.

Scott Kirsner passes along the news that even though the Academy has an official Oscar YouTube channel, they’ve so far failed to use it to showcase clips from last night’s show. Not only that, but they have YouTube hard at work removing clips from the show uploaded by other users––this clip, and this one, and this one were all removed within three hours of their upload.

And not only THAT, but with the exception of a clip from last year’s Jack Black/Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly medley, most of the recently uploaded clips from actual Oscar telecasts date back to the 75th edition of the show––which, of course, took place in 2003. So if you’re just now getting around to blogging about Adrien Brody kissing Halle Berry, you’re in luck! Or, you would be, if the entire channel didn’t disable embeds.

Chris is coming up with a list of things the Academy can do to improve telecast ratings, so check back later this afternoon for that. But this kind of thing has got to be one explanation for last night’s show doing so poorly. The new generation of celebrity porn addicts don’t even know they’re supposed to obsess about the Oscars, because the Perez Hiltons of the world are instead blogging about Jennifer Aniston’s frozen eggs, because at least they have visual aids for that.

The Oscar nominations were announced about an hour and a half ago. I feel like the last thing a girl needs on a cold Tuesday morning in Park City is to wake up to Dave Karger refusing to admit that he doesn’t actually know how to predict the future, so I didn’t get up to live blog it, but you can check out the full list of nominees here. Just skimming the list, I don’t see any huge huge surprises, but here are some thoughts:

**Two nominations for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Best Supporting Actor and Best Cinematography––the exact categories it should have been nominated in, really, but the latter’s something of a surprise, considering that most Academy members must have watched the film on a DVD screener. Imagine what Warner Brothers could do if they actually tried.
**Costume Design seems to be the place to give consolation prizes to ambitious but laughable period pics. I doubt either Across the Universe or The Golden Age will beat Sweeney Todd, but both get a kind of credibility that they probably don’t deserve just by being nominated. Then again, Golden Age is a film about costuming in a way like nothing else I’ve seen, maybe ever––it exists as an excuse to pit Cate Blanchett in a suit of armor––so if this category is really about which director gave up trying to tell a story in order to put on a batshit insane fashion show, it’s got to be a lock.

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• Will the strike motivate buyers to stock up on content, or will the rough recent art house climate discourage them from picking up all but the safest work? When it comes to the marketplace at the Sundance Film Festival (which begins today), all that seems certain is that star heavy, light-leaning comedies like What Just Happened? and Sunshine Cleaning are expected to have an easier time leaving Park City with a deal. So, in other words, no news to report yet.
• AMPAS is planning two separate Oscar shows: one in case the WGA makes nice with the studios or grants them a waiver to use writers, and an “alternative” strike-proof telecast. Oscar telecast producer Gil Cates is keeping quiet on what form the “alternative” show could take, but Variety speculates that it would probably “rely on industry heavyweights penning their own speeches and presenting the awards.”
• “Anticipation of a DGA deal is amping up the pressure from all sides on the leadership of the Writers Guild,” says Dave McNary. The AMPTP is expected to hand down an offer this week, and writers are apparently threatening that they’ll resign from the WGA and go “financial core,” allowing them to go back to work without union protections, if the DGA rejects it out of hand.

Wow. AMPAS released their shortlist of nine finalists for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination today, and it’s missing a LOT of familiar titles. Like Cannes winner and presumed front runner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Like festival favorites Edge of Heaven and Persepolis. Like the great Silent Light, which Tartan has still not set a US release date for, and probably won’t now that their hopes for free publicity have been dashed.

Not to take anything away from the finalists (and though I haven’t seen any of them, I’ve certainly heard many good things about some of them, especially The Counterfeiters and Days of Darkness), but I’m sure we can expect to see much grousing about this from fans of the snubbed films, particularly 4 Months. But you have to hand the prognostication prize to Cinemascope, who predicted way back in early December that “the Romanian abortion movie” wouldn’t make the final five “because the style of the movie-making is all but indigestible to American viewers.” Of course, the same post predicted Persepolis as the race’s frontrunner. Win some, lose some, etc.

The films that did make the cut are listed after the jump.

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In the time it took me to go to the kitchen and microwave my lunch, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just made it a lot easier to qualify for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination. Wasn’t that easy?

The current, much-discussed rules require features to screen at least once in at 14 cities in at least 10 states; these new rules, which will govern films released between now and August 31, 2008 for consideration at the Oscars in 2009, simply state that features “must run for a minimum of seven days in both Los Angeles County and the Borough of Manhattan.” This alone should be much more do-able for the average documentary filmmaker––and it’ll eliminate the need for a off-the-beaten-path, self-financed qualifying run like the one for Billy the Kid––but the Academy has also decided to allow digital submissions of short listed films, eliminating the once-mandatory (and costly) production of celluloid prints for semi-finalists.

You can read the full press release here. In other documentary news, AJ Schnack has a rundown of the year so far in documentary box office, and for all of the complaints that No End in Sight either failed to break through Iraq fatigue or was prevented from doing so, it’s interesting to see that it’s in second place for the year, behind Sicko.