Oscars Traditionalists Are Coming Remarkably Close to Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

With a billion-dollar blockbuster about white male geniuses leading the race for Best Picture, the academy’s traditionalist wing had to search long and hard for evidence to buttress the perennial complaint that the Oscars’ taste has gotten too rarified. But after profiles of prominent American figures like Michael J. Fox, Jon Batiste, and Nikki Giovanni were passed over in favor of documentaries from Ukraine, Chile, and Uganda, it has settled on Best Documentary Feature as the place to make its stand. In an article in the trade bible Variety earlier this week, academy members and awards consultants lined up to complain that this year’s crop of nominees was evidence of a system in desperate need of reform. As one previous nominee wrote to the Hollywood Reporter the morning the nominations were announced: “It’s broken.”

What’s startling about this chorus isn’t that it exists—sour grapes follow snubs as surely as night does day—but how close some of the complainants come to saying the quiet part out loud. “It is deeply concerning to me that the doc branch did not nominate a single film by an American filmmaker,” an unnamed producer of an Oscar-winning documentary told Variety. “So many of us have worked so hard to make great films that break out of the little ghetto documentaries used to be kept in for so long. While I love many of these films, as a group they put us right back in that ghetto.”

Jason Ishikawa, of the distributor and sales company Cinetic Media, was even more blunt. “There is this resentment towards certain kinds of success,” he said. “I just feel like so many people in this industry … have been working so hard to move this mindset out of this ghettoization of nonfiction and it just feels like that work is being undermined.”

The concerns come after a particularly dire year for nonfiction films at the box office. While a handful of faith-based documentaries broke $1 million in ticket sales, The Eternal Memory, the highest-grossing nominee, topped out at $67,000. (Both academy rules and box-office tallies exclude concert films like Taylor Swift’s and Beyoncé’s.) In large part, that’s because the documentaries whose subjects might have drawn the most attention made their real impact on streaming: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie went to Apple TV+; American Symphony, a portrait of the Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste, was made for Netflix. When the unnamed producer complains that the doc-branch voters overlooked “some of the most successful and most beloved films of the year,” what they’re really talking about is films about successful and beloved people—more specifically, American celebrities.

They are also, not coincidentally, some of the movies with the biggest and most insistent awards campaigns behind them. In the final months of last year, my inbox pinged almost nonstop with invitations to in-person screenings of American Symphony and Still, often attended by filmmakers and subjects and hosted by prominent figures in the documentary community. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course: Everyone knows the game and plays it to the best of their ability. But it’s hardly a level playing field: Given the razor-thin profit margins of all but the most popular documentaries, few of the distributors behind them can hope to compete, at least in terms of marketing budget, with the bottomless resources of Netflix or Apple. (It’s worth noting that several of the eventual nominees are also backed by arms of major media conglomerates, including Paramount’s MTV and Disney’s National Geographic.)

In the Variety article, several subjects skate within a hair’s breadth of complaining outright that you just can’t buy an Oscar nomination the way you used to. It’s bad for business when companies spend millions on awards campaigns and walk away empty-handed. (It’s also bad for trade papers like Variety, which rake in huge sums in For Your Consideration ads at the height of the season.) With the possible exception of true crime, there’s no genre of documentary more dominant than the celebrity portrait—basically any movie whose title contains a famous name and a colon—to the extent that it’s become difficult for filmmakers to find money for anything besides those two genres. In part, it’s the documentary equivalent of optimizing for SEO, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both modes combine talking-head interviews in controlled settings with previously existing footage, eliminating the costly and speculative aspects of vérité-style on-the-ground filmmaking. Why spend years trying to find a story when you can start with one people already know?

For the self-styled populists who claim that Oscar voters are holding the medium back, the rejection of boldfaced names feels like a giant step backward. But several of the nominees are about prominent figures, if not ones that are immediately familiar to many Americans. Augusto Góngora, whose Alzheimer’s disease eats away at his mind over the course of The Eternal Memory, was a prominent Chilean journalist and TV presenter, something like a cross between Charlie Rose and Dick Cavett; the protagonist of Bobi Wine: The People’s President was a popular musician before he became a member of the Ugandan Parliament and ran for the country’s presidency. Are they any less famous than the former bandleader of the Late Show? I’d never heard of either before seeing the (excellent) documentaries about them, but that is more a reflection of my own limitations than their achievements.

It may be true that the members of the documentary branch, which, like the rest of the academy, has been significantly diversified, and especially internationalized, by an influx of new voters, don’t “give a fuck about these American films,” as filmmaker Sam Pollard told Variety. But it could also be that the voters simply did what they were supposed to do: watch all 15 movies and pick the ones they thought were best. I doubt they’re indifferent to, say, the determination Michael J. Fox has shown during his decadeslong battle with Parkinson’s disease. But it’s possible that academy members who didn’t grow up quite so immersed in the Back to the Future movies may be less predisposed to find his story more compelling than Augusto Góngora’s—and The Eternal Memory’s director, Maite Alberdi, was less inclined to trust that her audiences would feel a connection to her subject unless she did the work of establishing one.

For observers without financial skin in the game, the academy’s documentary category has made enormous progress in the past decade, since filmmaker Michael Moore pushed the branch to open the nomination process rather than leaving it in the hands of closed-door committees. Before then, the nominations tended to be both a puzzle and, frequently, an embarrassment, shunning not only popular successes—Hoop Dreams was famously snubbed by the doc branch, even as it received a nomination for best editing—but many of the medium’s most important figures. D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers, the fathers of American observational documentary, received one nomination apiece over their long careers; neither won. Frederick Wiseman, widely recognized as the greatest living American documentarian, has been making movies for nearly six decades without a single Oscar nomination. (The academy did eventually try to rectify some of these oversights by giving Pennebaker and Wiseman honorary awards.) Wiseman’s luck hasn’t improved in the past decade: His latest, Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, was, in a rare moment of bicoastal unity, named the best documentary of the year by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It didn’t even make the shortlist. But the documentary branch has recognized with nominations genuinely groundbreaking works like RaMell Ross’ lyrical Hale County This Morning, This Evening and Joshua Oppenheimer’s performative hybrid The Act of Killing, the kinds of unconventional works that would never have survived the old academy’s retrograde notions of documentary purity. Far from being broken, the Best Documentary category is now arguably the Oscars’ strongest. I’d be more confident in telling people to watch all five documentary nominees than I would all 10 Best Picture contenders.

Many of the academy’s new members seem to think the documentary branch is doing just fine. The producer Charlotte Cook, who joined in 2021, tweeted that the criticisms in the Variety article were “embarrassing for the field, both incredibly depressing and disrespectful of the nominees.” Among the major categories, Best Documentary remains the most difficult to predict; awards prognosticators may fume that the branch has snubbed the front-runners, but with few precursor awards to take members’ temperature, there’s precious little advance data to go on. (The fact that ranking contenders by the size of their awards campaigns doesn’t produce reliable results is a problem for the pundits, not the process.) But when so many other categories seem set in stone before the movies have even been seen, the wild-card quality of the documentary nominees can be a genuine thrill, one that pales only beside the excitement of watching the nominated documentaries themselves.