Is Jackass Two the Biggest Nonfiction Film of the Year?

The biggest nonfiction film of 2006 opens nationwide today.  Paramount and MTV Films' Jackass Number Two is set to quickly eclipse Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and will probably top the original Jackass, which was released in 2002 and grossed 64 million, which should put it third on the list of all-time documentaries, that is if there was a consensus of whether Jackass and its sequel qualifies.

A few years ago, at least one influential critic (I'm thinking that it was Manohla Dargis in her excellent "ask the critic" column in the LA Times, but I could be remembering it wrong) wondered if Jackass shouldn't be eligible and, indeed, shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. 

This year, Nathan Lee at the NY Times, gives the film a full-throated, and cinematically-relevant, endorsement:

Debased, infantile and reckless in the extreme, this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated and cathartic comedy in modern movies.

You may prefer a Buster Keaton gag to the spectacle of a man leaping from a trampoline into a ceiling fan, but you can’t argue with its purity of expression. At the root of the “Jackass” project is an impulse to deny the superego and approach the universe, with all its hard edges and shark-infested waters, as an enormous, undifferentiated playpen. That, and the impulse to watch a 400-pound woman belly-flop on top of a midget. The Surrealists would have loved these guys, and relished the film’s signature image: the application of a leech to the surface of an eyeball.

Now, it's unlikely that Johnny Knoxville and company are looking for an Oscar nod.  And even if they qualified, it seems unlikely that they'd make it through the screening procedures and short-listing.  But does the film deserve to be considered?  Is it even a documentary?  And if it isn't, what disqualifies it?  The "scripted" stunts?  Is setting up a specific stunt any different than setting up an interview?

There's no question that Jackass will be the biggest nonfiction film this year, the question is whether anyone, in the doc world or out, will acknowledge it.