I’m going to go ahead and answer the question I posed in the headline: No. Now, let’s back up a bit…

At Movie City News, Kim Voynar has written a column in which she admits that she has “just not been blown out of the water much by the docs this year”:

Maybe it’s the tightening of the economy overall making it harder for filmmakers to get compelling documentaries made. Maybe we’re just in a cycle of docs not being the preferred flavor of the month again…Many of the docs I saw this year, while they had interesting subject matter, were not what I would consider “theatrical” films. They were films that would have played just as well, or even better, on a television screen.

As you might have guessed, I disagree that this has been a weak year for documentaries. As I wrote last week, many of the most successful nonfiction films of the year have been challenging in form and idiosyncratic in content, and though I’m not cukoo-bananas for all of them, I think the fact that art seems to be trumping artless activism is encouraging. But that is not the aspect of Voynar’s piece that I take issue with. This is the aspect of Voynar’s piece that I take issue with:

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I was pleased to be asked to participate in indieWIRE’s post-TIFF critics poll, through which consensus selected Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking as Best Film, Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler) as Best Performance, and Les Plages d’Agnes by Agnes Varda as Best Doc. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any of those movies, but the three titles I named as my favorite films of the fest all made the poll’s top ten: Summer Hours, Rachel Getting Married, and Treeless Mountain. For Best Performance, I named Treeless‘ Hee Yeon Kim, Mathieu Almaric from A Christmas Tale (maybe technically a Cannes film, but he still blows most of the competition out of the water, as far as I’m concerned) and Matthew Newton, director/writer/star of Three Blind Mice. I didn’t see as many docs as I would have liked (I guess I’m saving them for the fall season of Stranger Than Fiction, programmed, like TIFF’s Reel to Reel, by Thom Powers), but by far my favorite was Blind Loves.

We still have a bit of TIFF coverage in the can for posting over the next few days, BTW. Look for interviews with Jonathan Demme, Anne Hathaway, Ari Folman and more by the end of the week.

“I have to say, up until this moment, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this,” said TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers in his introduction of Paris, Not France, undoubtedly referencing the hullabaloo that sprung up over the past few weeks when the film’s four planned festival screenings were reduced to one amidst rumors of possible legal action from the Hilton camp. But if Paris Hilton (or anyone on her payroll) is suing Adria Petty (or anyone on her payroll) because of this film, she is a) insane, and b) so fiercely committed to putting on a pretty face for the camera that she’ll actually a walk a red carpet in support of a film which she allegedly doesn’t want you to see.

Yes, Paris was in the building tonight. As soon as the emergency exit door at stage left popped open, someone in the audience cried, “Paris!” and a hush fell over the crowd. The 800 or so ticket holders at the Ryerson watched in virtual silence as Paris––head down, face blank––allowed herself to be led by boyfriend Benji Madden to their reserved seats. And then the snapping started. Cellphones, point and clicks, professional cameras—it seemed like everyone had one, and everyone stood up to train it on the rail-thin blonde, panopticon-style. The snapping just went on and on until Powers took the stage and cracked, “Don’t you want to take a picture of me?” (As I write this, an hour after the screening let out, images of Paris on tonight’s red carpet have already hit the wires.)

In the lobby after the screening, a gang of journalists clustered together, and somebody threw out a phrase that seemed to float above the room and immediately etch itself larger-than-life in granite as the shortcut to Paris, Not France’s dismissal: “It’s a love letter.” That’s certainly one way to look at it. Another, is that if this is a film about Paris Hilton at all, whether loving or otherwise, then it’s a failure, because it so convinces that there is no Paris Hilton, only “Paris Hilton”––a brand designed to sell watches and perfume who has assumed the now-empty shell of the once-vivacious party girl. Though the director tries to sell the idea that her subject is a self-marketing whiz who calculatingly hides her real self behind a cover that is deliberately without content in order to make for smoother mass consumption, neither the film nor its star ever convinces that there’s a significantly more substantial real self to hide. But! If Paris is merely using the heiress as an in to talk about the cold, mechanical efficiency of today’s celebrity culture, to give the consumers of surface-as-depth media (that means you, and you, and of course, me) a demystified glimpse at the way our US Weekly is made, at the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like process by which human beings are used as vessels to fill an unquenchable thirst on the part of the masses for yet more media about we which we just don’t have to think…well, that would really be something.

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Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”

Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once.  We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”

But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. …Read more

Yance Ford, a producer for PBS’s documentary series P.O.V., has a long consideration of Tuesday night’s Cinema Eye Honors at the P.O.V. blog. Though Ford has much praise for the project as a whole, she takes umbrage with one portion of Thom Powers’ opening remarks, and it happens to be one section of the evening that irked me, as well. Over to Yance:

I know Thom Powers to be a thoughtful, passionate programmer and a great filmmaker in his own right. But his opening remarks included a remark that I found troubling.He said that “distributors don’t get it, critics don’t get it and the general public doesn’t get it. We wanted to fill [this auditorium] with people who get it.” I’ll be the first to agree that independent documentary does not get the recognition it deserves, but I don’t think that the problem is the fact that the general public doesn’t “get it.” The problem is that the general public doesn’t get to see it.

Ford goes on to make the case that “as long as the documentary community prioritizes theatrical release and festival runs over broadcast, the public will continue to miss a large and dynamic body of work,” which could be construed as being a bit self-serving coming from the producer of a broadcast documentary program. But I think she’s right to point out that “the general public” hardly deserves blame for not supporting films that get little to no publicity, which are reviewed in only a fraction of publications. The average moviegoer would have to do a good deal of detective work to know that 80% of the films nominated for a Cinema Eye even existed. Isn’t that why the Cinema Eyes exist in the first place?

Whether intentionally or not (and I would assume probably not), Powers is basically making the same argument that Lou Lumenick made in the most hateable quote in that Hollywood Reporter story that everyone’s mad about: the New York Post critic claimed that it’s not his responsibility to review smaller films because “The only complaints we’ve gotten (on not running some reviews) are from publicists and distributors…Not a single one from readers.” In no other market sector would the consumer be blamed for not demanding a product that they didn’t know was available.

At a reception here in Park City on Sunday afternoon, filmmakers AJ Schnack and Margaret Brown were joined by Indiepix’s Danielle DiGiacomo and the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers to announce the nominees for a new batch of awards honoring excellence in non-fiction filmmaking: the Cinema Eyes. Schnack, who previously announced the formation of the awards on his blog, explained that the name was inspired by Dziga Vertov’s Kino Eye. The gang then announced the nominees for 8 juried awards, plus an audience award, which the public will be able to vote for at Indiepix.net. You can take a look at the full nominee list here.

Based on sheer volume of nominations, it looks like the big winners here are Manda Bala, Into Great Silence, and Zoo––all films that made a great impression at Sundance in 2006 and 2007, all of which failed to land on the Academy’s short list. This would indicate that the nominations have already succeeded in representing the point of view of the doc community, and as a corrective to the widely disappointing Academy finalists. The awards themselves will be handed out on March 18 at the IFC Center in New York.

An email from AJ Schnack reveals that he, in partnership with the Toronto Film Festival’s Thom Powers and Indiepix.net, are launching a new range of awards for “excellence in non-fiction filmmaking.”

Prompted in part by general disappointment in the doc community over the Oscar shortlist, a panel of twelve film festival directors have produced a short list of 15 films, which will be eligible for nominations in nine categories. There are four films common to both the Oscar shortlist and this new list: Lake of Fire, No End in Sight, Sicko and Taxi to the Dark Side. The nominations, and the official name of the awards, will be announced at a press conference at the Sundance Film Festival, which you can be sure the Spouties will try to attend. In the meantime, you can peruse the panel, the shortlist, the categories, and AJ’s blog post about how the awards came to be.