What a Week! Sundance, IDA, Spirit Nods, Gothams All Converge as Indie Doc Calendar Turns to 2011

It's the biggest five days on the indie doc calendar and it starts today.

We're not even out of the shadow of IDFA (and wondering whether we will soon see films like IDFA champ POSITION AMONG THE STARS, MARATHON BOY and THE GOOD LIFE in Park City) and we're still a bit full from Thanksgiving, but this is truly the turning of our own liturgical calendar - we're about to toast some of the best films from 2010 even as we whet our appetites for what will come at us in January.

It all kicks off tonight when NYC's indie film folk gather for this year's Gotham Awards.  The documentary category there is particularly choice: three films left off the Academy's doc shortlist - Laura Poitras' THE OATH, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's 12TH AND DELAWARE and Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's SWEETGRASS - will face off with Academy frontrunner INSIDE JOB (directed by Charles Ferguson) and Martin Scorsese's PUBLIC SPEAKING, which just premiered on HBO.  Not a bad apple in the bunch. [I've already written on THE OATH and DELAWARE - two of my favorite films of this year - and am a fan of SWEETGRASS & INSIDE JOB.  I loved the economy of PUBLIC SPEAKING - it's a smart, compact biodoc - even if it's not quite at the level of its four competitors.]

Important to note as always - the Gotham winner has never gone on to win the Best Documentary Feature Oscar - so INSIDE JOB may be hoping to just sit this one out.

THE OATH and SWEETGRASS will another moment in the sun at the end of the week, as awards festivities move to Los Angeles for the IDA Documentary Awards.  Those two films will battle in the Feature Documentary category with Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, Joonas Berghaell and Mika Hotakainen's Finish sensation STEAM OF LIFE and Lucy Walker's audience fave WASTE LAND.  For the first time, the IDA is opening up its voting to its membership, which suggests that that an audience favorite might have the inside track (that means you Banksy and Walker), although some are predicting (hoping?) that the IDA might make up for the Academy's oversight of THE OATH.

Since we mentioned that the Gothams make a poor Oscar predictor, here's this: the IDA winner has gone on to be the Oscar recipient just twice in the past 12 years (and in both those year's the IDA feature prize was shared by two films).

All of this year's docs will get one last bite at the Big 5 Awards apple early Tuesday AM when nominations are announced for the 2011 Independent Spirit Awards.  If THE OATH is nominated Tuesday, it will become the first film to sweep nods from Cinema Eye, IDA, Gothams and Spirits and fail to get Oscar shortlisted.  Among other considerations - how will frontrunners INSIDE JOB and suprisingly-eligible EXIT fare with the Spirits jury.  Will the Spirits be the place where JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (previously nominated here for THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT) finally gets its due? And which three docs will make the Truer Than Fiction prize lineup?

Oscar foreshadower? In the past ten years, the eventual Oscar winner prevailed at the Spirit Awards four times (three times in the Feature Documentary category, once in Truer Than Fiction).  In the other six years? The Oscar winner wasn't even nominated.

[Since we're talking who predicts Oscar best, we should note that in the first three years of Cinema Eye, the Oscar winner took home either the feature prize or the director prize.  For that to happen again this year, the Oscar winner and Cinema Eye feature winner would have to be EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.  We should also note that the first two editions of Cinema Eye came after the Oscar ceremony.]

Rounding out the awards will be the announcement on Thursday of this year's National Board of Review winners - the strange and somewhat mysterious organization that has established itself as the first of the year's "critics" prizes (although they aren't actually critics). And guess what, folks, it turns out that the NBR is the best Oscar predictor of them all - they've actually called the race in 7 of the past 8 years (missing only the late surge by TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE in 2007.  They even called BORN IN BROTHELS in 2004 and THE COVE last year (even after it had been ignored by all the major awards save Cinema Eye).  But it's not just calling the winners that makes the NBR a great Oscar predictor - last year they also called three of the other eventual nominees: BURMA VJ, FOOD INC. and the somewhat surprising Daniel Ellsberg film, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA.

But if that's rounding up the best of the year that's closing, the week's biggest announcement will be the signal of what's ahead - the competition line-ups for the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.  And while it's going to be hard to top the starpower of 2010, we're hearing that this year's slate is no slouch - including at least two Oscar winners with new films and some high profile titles by big name docmakers. 

A big week ahead, indeed.