What’s the deal with the film Academy’s documentary branch? This season’s shortlist for the best documentary feature Oscar, released Dec. 17, was missing one of the year’s most acclaimed crowd-pleasers, Warner Bros.’ Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story — which is at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, won the top Critics Choice documentary award and is nominated for the Producers Guild’s top doc award — and also impressive documentaries about Martha Stewart (Martha), Celine Dion (I Am: Celine Dion), James Carville (Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) and John Williams (Music by John Williams), among others.
This isn’t to say that the 15 docs that were shortlisted are lacking — to the contrary, most are excellent. But it does reconfirm the doc branch’s weird aversion, over roughly the past decade, to worthy but populist titles.
During that period, the branch declined to shortlist Good Night Oppy, a charmer about a WALL-E-like Mars rover that many regarded as a potential winner, as well as a host of other popular docs related to celebrities, including Alexander McQueen (McQueen, from the team that went on to direct Super/Man), Quincy Jones (Quincy), Aretha Franklin (Amazing Grace), Anthony Bourdain (Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain), Val Kilmer (Val) and Robert Downey Sr. (Sr.).
And it shortlisted but declined to nominate the blockbusters Apollo 11 and Three Identical Strangers as well as a host of other popular docs related to such notables as Fred Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Roger Ebert (Life Itself), Billie Eilish (Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry), Jon Batiste (American Symphony), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Knock Down the House), Michael J. Fox (Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie), Jane Goodall (Jane) and David Bowie (Moonage Daydream).
At a certain point, it becomes impossible to deny that the branch has a problem with these sorts of films. And though I can’t prove it, I suspect I know what it is.
My sense, from talking to many branch members who talk to many branch members, is that much of the branch doesn’t want to advance a populist doc because members know that if it ends up nominated, then the full Academy, which gets to join the branch in picking the winner, will choose it over a doc with arguably more social import, as happened repeatedly around a decade ago when winners included Searching for Sugar Man (which was chosen over 5 Broken Cameras), 20 Feet From Stardom (over The Act of Killing), Amy (over The Look of Silence) and O.J.: Made in America (over I Am Not Your Negro).
In 2016, in the wake of the second consecutive year of #OscarsSoWhite, the doc branch, as much as any, embarked on an admirable effort to make itself more diverse. In the course of achieving that objective — it’s now 53 percent female, 33 percent people of color and 31 percent based outside of the U.S. — it exploded in size, up from 237 members heading into the Oscars in 2016 to its current tally of 693. Simultaneously, its tastes appear to have increasingly diverged from those of most moviegoers.
Last year, all five of the best documentary feature Oscar nominees were non-English-language titles — 20 Days in Mariupol, Bobi Wine: The People’s President, The Eternal Memory, Four Daughters and To Kill a Tiger — and virtually nobody outside of the branch ever paid to see any of them, before or after the Oscars. (Their respective reported theatrical grosses: $35,000, $44,000, $119,000, $1.2 million and none, though To Kill a Tiger ended up being bought by and streaming on Netflix.)
Proponents of the current path argue that if the branch doesn’t celebrate less mainstream fare, those sorts of docs will cease to exist, and besides, the doc community is composed of underdogs who should celebrate underdogs. But detractors say that it’s born out of virtue-signaling and resentment about the narrowing sort of docs that get financed these days (primarily celeb-centric music, sports and true-crime pics) and the relatively small pool of documentarians who get to direct them (past nominees and winners rarely get return invitations these days).
One displeased veteran branch member who feels the system is “broken” argues: “The only way to fix it is to open up the voting so that anyone in the Academy can opt in to vote on the shortlist and the nominations, like they can with the international and animated feature categories.”
But this year, even under the current system, is it possible that a Trojan horse might sneak through a breach in the branch?
Will & Harper, the one celeb-centric doc that made this year’s shortlist, follows Will Ferrell as he travels across America with Harper Steele, a former SNL writer who long has been one of his closest friends, shortly after she came out to him as trans. The film, which Netflix acquired out of Sundance, received raves (it’s at 99 percent on Rotten Tomatoes). The doc community has embraced it — it tied Super/Man for the top CCDA honor, was included on the DOC NYC shortlist and was one of 10 titles included on the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Panel (which, full disclosure, I help to organize), all of which are historically harbingers of Academy recognition.
Moreover, the branch, which has a long history of embracing docs that deal with LGBTQ subject matter, is voting in the aftermath of a U.S. presidential election that may have been tipped by anti-trans rhetoric and which has sent a chill through Hollywood — Disney’s Pixar, for instance, just scrapped a trans storyline that was to be featured in its first original series, Win or Lose. So trans allies in the branch may feel that it’s more important to nominate a doc that promotes tolerance than it is to worry that such a film might go on to win.
But will a sufficient number of branch members vote to nominate it? The doc community appears to be at least as enamored with six other titles. Sugarcane, about wrongdoing at Indian residential schools, is the only doc that was or is up for the top honor of every major precursor group (CCDA, DOC NYC, SCAD, the Cinema Eye Honors and the International Documentary Association). No Other Land, an Israeli-Palestinian collaboration about Israeli actions in the West Bank, was a CEH, DNYC and IDA finalist and won the top doc prizes of the Berlin Film Festival and Gotham, L.A. Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle and European Film Awards. And there’s also Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (CEH, DNYC, IDA, EFA), Daughters (CCDA, CEH, DNYC and SCAD), Black Box Diaries (CEH, DNYC, IDA and SCAD) and Dahomey (CEH, DNYC, IDA and EFA), which also is shortlisted for the best international feature Oscar.
If, in the end, Will & Harper is nominated, it will almost certainly win. It surely has been and will be watched by more Academy members from across the branches than any other shortlisted doc (an original tune from the film was even shortlisted by the music branch for the best original song Oscar), and though Academy members are not supposed to vote unless they have seen every nominee in a category, most do so anyway.
That being the case, it will be fascinating to see if the branch opts to nominate it.
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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