In Depth: The Truth About the Academy's New Rules For Docs

Before John Sinno wrote his "open letter to the Academy", the whole issue of Oscar rules for docs was inside baseball.  Sure, there'd been the occasional blog post or trade article, debates on message boards, even a contentious meeting or two.  But why would the rest of the world (or even those with a keen interest in art house cinema) care?  Mostly, they wouldn't.  Enter Sinno, who helped distribute James Longley's Iraq in Fragments and was given a producer credit on the film (and subsequently was nominated for the Documentary Feature Oscar this year), and his letter, which had a touch of star power (the basis was a complaint that Oscar presenter Jerry Seinfeld had shown disrespect for the Oscar nominees with his jokes) and which culminated in a charge leveled against newly-discussed Oscar rules:

Seinfeld’s introduction arrived on the heels of an announcement by the Academy that the number of cities where documentary films must screen to qualify for an Academy Award is being increased by 75%. This will make it much more difficult for independent filmmakers’ work to qualify for the Best Documentary Feature Award, while giving an advantage to films distributed by large studios. Fewer controversial films will qualify for Academy consideration, and my film Iraq in Fragments would have been disqualified this year. This announcement came as a great disappointment to me and to other documentary filmmakers. I hope the Academy will reconsider its decision.

[The full text of Sinno's letter and my response can be found here.]

While most of the posts online dealt with Sinno's charge against Seinfeld, a number of the posts started to focus on the new rules - with many claiming that "what I find more interesting" was Sinno's claim that Iraq in Fragments wouldn't have qualified.  Nearly all took Sinno's accusations at face value.  [See posts from Sasha Stone, Nikki Finke, Erik Moe and Bilge Ebiri.]  Further, commenters to various posts weighed in to decry the new rules.  In response to Ebiri's post at Nerve.com, Blue23 wrote:

Those qualifications are completely unrealistic for a documentary. Besides "An Inconvenient Truth" which was considered a runaway success for a docu which of this year's films would have met these?

My own response to Sinno's letter was the only example I can find where someone challenged his assertion that Iraq in Fragments would not have qualified under the new, then-pending rules.  My post led to an animated phone conversation between Sinno and myself that had no real resolution, other than that I admire his putting money into James' film, which I consider one of the great films of 2006. 

[James himself has stayed mostly quiet on the issue, although he did post in the comments at Seattlest: 

"For my part, I thought Seinfeld's introduction was pretty funny. But, like David said, what do I know? Anyway, even if Seinfeld wasn't at the top of his form, his comments hardly took anything away from documentary film. It's good to have a sense of humor. So I think you're on your own with this one, John."]

Reading many of the posts, and comments like those of Blue 23 (above), I was irritated that there was a perception, however misguided, that none of this year's documentary nominees - aside from the blockbuster (for an indie doc) Inconvenient Truth - could have qualified under the new rules; that somehow playing 15 cities was this wholly unattainable goal for nonfiction filmmakers.  This is not hyperbole, it's an actual argument made both publicly and privately by some doc filmmakers and the occasional small distributor - that it's just too much to ask docmakers to do.  Considering that my first film, Gigantic, which made a decent but small sum at the box office, played in more than 40 cities theatrically, and knowing that numerous docs in 2006 played as many or more dates, this "whoa is us" argument is not only patently false but also sets up a notion that we're pretty much illegitimate as a box office entity.  Which, considering the current state of documentary distribution (as in, the number of players has collapsed and many are back to their "one doc a year" formulation) is not a notion I'm particularly inclined to promote.

[For context, here's a list of 30 documentaries that played more than 15 cities in 2006 - it is not meant to be a complete tally:  49 Up, 51 Birch Street, Al Franken: God Spoke, American Hardcore, Black Gold, The Bridge, Cocaine Cowboys, Deliver Us From Evil, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, The Heart of the Game, Inconvenient Truth, Iraq in Fragments, Jesus Camp, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man, Once in a Lifetime, Our Brand is Crisis, Shut Up and Sing, Sketches of Frank Gehry, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Unknown White Male, An Unreasonable Man, The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, The War Tapes, Why We Fight, Who Killed the Electric Car? and Wordplay.]

Meanwhile, looking around and having the occasional conversation at film festivals, I'd noticed that many were very unclear as to what the new rules were exactly.  While people got the gist - you'd have to play more theatres - the details were often lost.  So last week, I talked to Academy governors Freida Lee Mock and Michael Apted about the new rules, in an attempt to clarify the swirling rumors and misinformation.

But before I get to the new rules, some important history.

For much of the past two decades, the way the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences handed out its award for Best Documentary Feature has been the subject of some controversy.  Much of the criticism has come from outside the Academy, primarily when well-known and critically acclaimed nonfiction films (such as The Thin Blue Line, Roger and Me, Hoop Dreams, Crumb and Startup.com) were passed over, while other, less well-known, often bound-for-television docs were nominated.   Those who voted for the documentary prize were often characterized as elitist or clubby, and accused of only voting for their friends or a specific issue or cause, as was characterized by a stretch in which Holocaust-themed films won the award four out of six years.

In a lengthy piece for The Nation in 2001, Carl Bromley investigated the history of recent complaints, starting with a story about the 2000 Oscar ceremony:

A few minutes before the winner in the Best Documentary Feature category was announced at last year's Oscars, Wim Wenders was feeling pretty confident. After all, his film, Buena Vista Social Club, had been a huge commercial and critical success, and it was the odds-on favorite to win. But then, according to Wenders, producer Arthur Cohn--whose picture, One Day in September, a sleek, flashy film about the kidnapping and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, was also in the running--approached him and said, "Whatever happens today, I hope we will remain friends and keep a mutual respect for each other." Says Wenders, "Before I could really say anything, he was gone again. That's when I had a sudden sinking feeling that we had been pretty naïve in thinking we had a good chance. I sat down and realized that [Cohn] didn't have to ask for mutual respect. That is the rule of the game in the Oscars; it goes without saying. You would only ask for it if you had a bad conscience, so to speak."

Wenders' bewitching film was about to go the way of so many other popular documentaries (if they were lucky enough even to be nominated): eclipsed by a virtually unknown film whose total audience barely exceeded the tiny fraction of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members who had seen it. When Cohn collected the Oscar, Wenders applauded, but Cohn's acceptance speech, he says, "left me speechless. Congratulating the academy for being able to distinguish between commercial success and artistic value was a slap in the face of all the other nominees. You just don't do that to your competitors when you get up there to receive an Oscar. Some of the other nominees sitting just behind us were just as appalled." Wenders walked out. "I was disappointed, but not because we lost," he continues. "Only because we had not really had a fair chance to win."

A box-office and critical hit with a strong distributor behind it not given a fair chance? Welcome to the strange world of the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Since 1995 three of the winners have been Holocaust documentaries--Anne Frank Remembered, The Long Way Home and The Last Days--and One Day in September had obvious Holocaust undertones. After Spike Lee's documentary Four Little Girls lost to The Long Way Home in 1997, Lee said, "When the film is about the Holocaust and one of the producers is a rabbi and it comes from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there are not many sure things in life, but that was a sure thing when you consider the makeup of the voting body of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I'd have rather been the New York Knicks in the fourth quarter, down ten points, a minute left in the United Center, than have the odds we faced of winning the Oscar against the Holocaust film."

While Bromley's article is a fascinating step back in time and interesting for the perspective of some of the filmmakers he talked to, there are a number of problems with the piece, particularly with the cautionary tale that he wraps around Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club and the film that would "steal" its Oscar, and it's mainly that One Day in September is a revelation, a sign of the stylistic adventurousness that would follow in the next decade and the announcement of a major directorial talent, Kevin McDonald.  As much as I like Buena Vista Social Club, there's really no comparison between the two films.  (Bromley felt differently and calls September "unoriginal" and "one-sided".)

But Bromley had tapped into a common, and perhaps not too off-the-mark complaint about the Academy's choices:

Over the past decade, the films nominated, with a few honorable exceptions, have been the cinematic equivalent of castor oil. Then-New York Times critic Janet Maslin described them as "films about the Holocaust, the disabled, hard-working artists and inspirational programs in the inner city"--worthy subjects that all too often get mediocre or sentimental treatment.

In other words, the struggle over the documentary Oscar is a cultural struggle over documentary itself: between what some call the academy's "cultural commissars," who dictate the definition of a "good" documentary, and a diverse documentary filmmaking community that has challenged the selection committee's conservative aesthetic values. It has been a fight against what Errol Morris calls the "Mother Teresa school of filmmaking--the idea that if a film is about an exemplary person or subject matter, then it follows that the film is just as good."

It hadn't always been this way.  In a conversation last week with Freida Lee Mock, the chair of the Academy's Documentary Branch, she told me that between 1980 and 2000, the state of the theatrical doc was almost at its nadir.  "25 years ago, TV started to dominate, cable started to dominate.  Before that, when I first started doing it, it wasn't like that," Mock said.

In The Nation article, Bromley tries to make the case that the films that were nominated in the 1970s (including Woodstock, Harlan County, U.S.A. and Hearts and Minds) were a world away from the films of the next two decades, but this is a bit simplistic.  Life before 1980 was not perfect (not a single nomination for the Maysles Brothers or D.A. Pennebaker or Robert Drew) nor was everything from 1980-2000 a grim wasteland (winners included The Times of Harvey Milk, When We Were Kings and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie).

But it was the accusations of insider trading that colored much of the complaints raised by critics of the documentary committee.  The loudest came when Hoop Dreams failed to clear the Academy's selection procedure and Mock herself won the Oscar that year for Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision.  Reporters and critics pointed to Mock's role on previous selection committees as an "aha!" moment.  They almost always failed to mention how good Maya Lin was and the rave reviews it had received.  Mock and her film were a convenient target for the Academy's critics, and for them, Hoop Dreams was the third strike (Thin Blue Line and Roger & Me being the first two) that led many to want to shine a light on the Academy's selection procedures.  From Bromley's article:

Committee member Mitchell Block told the Los Angeles Times: "I think [the distributors] set [The Thin Blue Line] up as a shoo-in and...created an expectation among members that the film couldn't meet. But there was no backlash. As a group, we simply thought the five nominated films were better." (ed. note: The five films nominated were Hotel Terminus, Bruce Weber's excellent Let's Get Lost, and the largely forgotten The Cry of Reason - Beyers Naude: An Afrikaner Speaks, Promises to Keep and Who Killed Vincent Chin?) 

When Michael Moore was overlooked for Roger & Me the following year, he pointed out in a New York Times Op-Ed: "Mr. Block has a financial interest in who gets nominated; he owns a documentary distribution company and, in the last 10 years, nearly one quarter of all films that have won the Academy Award for best documentary have been Mitchell Block films." In the year of Roger & Me's omission, Block owned the distribution rights to three of the nominees.

Bromley went on to suggest that committee members actually aligned themselves against films that had found success in theatres:

According to (filmmaker Alan) Adelson, during a pre-scoring meeting in which members deliberated over the films submitted, one voter warned that if Hoop Dreams was nominated, its victory would be certain. "He appealed to his fellow members to preserve other films' chances of winning the Oscar by denying Hoop Dreams a nomination altogether," Adelson wrote. When the committee voted, at least two other attendees allied themselves with the anti-Hoop Dreams speaker and denied Hoop Dreams by giving it the lowest possible score, even though other committee members awarded the film top scores.

Why the animosity toward Hoop Dreams? "Many of the committee members at the time considered documentary the real weakling in the cinema litter," Adelson told The Nation. "They had a patronizing, paternalistic attitude toward the form: Documentaries are never seen by anyone until the academy shines their light on it and gives the poor weakling sustenance. There was a sense of mission. They promoted films they thought the public needed. And they felt threatened by an already successful film."

Bromley closes his article with a bit of cloudy forecasting:

(D)espite recent reforms in the selection process, the real proof of the pudding will be the day Errol Morris takes home an Oscar, as Alan Adelson has suggested. But that could be a long time coming. Even if the restrictive voting rules are relaxed, there's no guarantee that the general membership will get things right. Still, applying the academy's usual standards to documentaries would be a big improvement. As it stands, says Morris, "I've got more of a chance winning my first Oscar for a fiction film than a documentary."

Just three years later, Errol Morris had his Oscar, for directing the documentary The Fog Of War.  Michael Moore had his for Bowling for Columbine, and the Academy had a new Documentary Branch, with three governors and with new rules that favored theatrically released films.  But it's been since 2003, when new rules were first put in place, rules that may have helped Morris win, that these new complaints have arisen, this time from within the documentary community.  Filmmakers, particularly those whose films that had not necessarily been made with a theatrical release in mind, argued that the new rules were unfair.  Sinno was tapping into a wave of discontent amongst some (but by no means all) documentary filmmakers.

[Before I go on, a bit of full disclosure on my part.  In a December 2003 article for the Hollywood Reporter (subscription required) that dealt with changing perceptions of documentaries, I was quoted as saying that I thought the focus on theatrical documentaries was good for filmmakers and correct for the Academy.  I have written here often on the topic and have credited the change in Academy rules for some of the popularity documentaries have seen over the past six years.  (See here, here, here and here.)  My own film will be going through the qualification and submission process this year.]

This year, just the threat of change - particularly the notion that the theatrical requirement would be strengthened - led to a confrontational meeting last December between filmmakers and Academy Governors Mock, Michael Apted and Rob Epstein which I wrote about here.  Since then, rumors and, in some cases, misinformation have been swirling about what the new rules would be and what - or should I say who (shades of conspiracy theories) - was behind the latest changes.  Recently the Academy posted its new rules on its website and I talked to Mock and Apted (who also serves as DGA President and who directed the well-known, critically acclaimed and not nominated "Up series" of films) to get more information.

The changes:  Qualifying for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar is a multi-part process.  First, films that wish to qualify for the documentary feature category still must have a 7-day qualifying run in Los Angeles or New York.  The films have to play a minimum of two times a day (previously this was one) and must screen between noon and 10 PM (eliminating the popular 11 AM screenings that defined the documentary qualifying run for decades).  Films must screen in an approved projected format (either on film or digital) that adheres to the Academy's technical standards.  According to Apted, these technical standards are uniform for both narrative (fiction) and nonfiction films.

Second, the film must then roll out to fourteen other cities in at least ten different states.  The film must play twice daily for at least three consecutive days.  This is the increase, up from 8 last year, that Sinno talked about in his open letter.  However, in an important and helpful change, the projection requirements for the fourteen rollout cities have been altered so that films can project in any standard format, including Digibeta or DVD.  (Previously, you had to fulfill the same technical specs as were required by your initial qualifying run.)  I would argue that despite the increase in the number of theatres, the relaxing of technical standards for the roll out makes the new rules actually easier (and certainly cheaper) for most filmmakers.

Apted described the allowance of additional formats as part of the Academy's desire to "find a balance between keeping the demands of the Academy to have a theatrical release and keeping abreast of the technology."

Some have raised the question of whether enough theatres even exist to meet this demand.  My own notion on this is pretty clear (not incidentally formed by my experience with Gigantic) but I asked Apted about alternate theatrical venues, such as Boston's Museum of Fine Arts or Los Angeles' American Cinematheque or Columbia's storefront Ragtag Cinemacafe.  Did museums or microcinemas count toward the 14?  Apted assured that they did, as long as films were advertised and admissions were paid.

"We're trying not to make filmmakers leap through hurdles or bankrupt them," Apted told me.  "But we want to have films that have a theatrical life."  Later in the conversation, he added, "I think that if you can't do 14 cities, 3 days in different cities, projecting off of DVD, then something is wrong."

Mock echoed the thought, asking rhetorically, "Is (just having) a 7-day qualifying run a theatrical documentary?  I don't think it is."

From my point of view, the most important change in the current rules is the mandate that the roll out must occur before the Academy announces the films that have made the semifinals, or as it is commonly referred to, "the shortlist".  Previously, filmmakers could wait to hear whether they'd gone on to the next round, and then would have to fulfill the 8 city roll out.  Some films, particularly those that were destined for television (and would only get a theatrical if they were shortlisted) would stop there theatrical efforts the moment they discovered they hadn't made the list.  With the new rules, films have to prove that they have had a theatrical life before they can even be considered for the shortlist.

Says Apted, "The Academy got all these submissions that had no real attempt at a theatrical plan and these are awards for theatrical movies."

Another important change is a concession to films funded by television entities.  Both Control Room and Why We Fight had been disqualified in recent years over television screenings which had been built into their funding window.  Now, films must only wait 60 days after they have completed their rollout requirement the first day of their qualifying run and must complete their rollout requirements before the film airs.  Finally, films can air on television before nominations are announced or awards are handed out. [correction made 8-7-07]

 

Apted called the change in television rules part of the Academy's "experimentation", and the changes seem, at least in part, designed to answer criticism regarding these earlier disqualifications, showing that the Academy is at least more nimble and responsive to change than they had been a decade ago.

Some filmmakers have complained that if your film is shortlisted, you must produce a 35mm film print, a costly process that is starting to seem unnecessary in the midst of the digital revolution.  I find this complaint a bit hard to swallow, considering that just 6 years ago you couldn't play a film festival without a print, but Apted says that it's something the Documentary Branch is looking at, and that it's conceivable that in the near future you wouldn't have to have a print if you made the semifinals.

[A full list of Academy rules for feature documentaries is available here.]

According to former IDA (International Documentary Association) Executive Director Betsy McLane, the move toward a theatrical requirement began after the Academy had considered whether to do away with the documentary categories.  Posting at indieWIRE (scroll down to comments), McLane wrote:

"Only through the very strenuous efforts of IDA and others in the field were the two categories saved. An independent study commissioned by AMPAS as to the theatrical viability of documentaries proved that there was ample reason to keep the categories, and even to create the documentary Branch. Recall that the Branch only has existed for a few years and that a number of dedicated documentarians- Freida Mock, Michael Apted, and Arthur Dong, among others- have advocated within that Branch for the documentary at AMPAS."

Mock said that the changes were not, as some have thought, part of a mandate handed down by the larger Academy but rather grew from the experience of becoming an official branch of the Academy.  In justifying why documentaries should be a granted their own branch, filmmakers started to talk about what made them filmmakers, "people who make movies", what made their films a theatrical entity.  She told me that they looked at the previous year, when many of the nominated docs had gone straight to television and hadn't had any theatrical release.  The question Mock and others found themselves deliberating over was a fundamental one, "Are you a theatrical form?"

Both Mock and Apted talked about troubles in the previous decade, with Mock calling the 90's bumpy and Apted more bluntly calling the process "scandalous".  Apted said that the goal with each adjustment of the rules - and it sounds simple enough - was that the films nominated would actually be the best films of that year.

Some in the documentary community seems stuck in the mindset of the 1990s, with the idea that if you make a feature-length nonfiction film you should be able to play a couple mornings at the Laemmle Monica and be in the mix for the Oscar.  Some argue that it should be up to a selection committee to determine what is theatrical and what is television. 

But, in the current climate, who's going to make that choice?  Is Jesus Camp, a movie funded by a feature film arm of a cable television network, bound for theatres or bound for television?  What about The Trials of Darryl Hunt, one of the best films of last year, which received some of its funding from HBO?  Who should be entrusted with separating one type of film from another?  And isn't this how we got into the "scandalous" '90s in the first place?

Ultimately, the more films that play in more venues, the better it is for all of us who make nonfiction films.  Even if you're self-distributing and finding houses that will show your digibeta for a Monday - Wednesday run, we are, as a group, better off.  Every time that people pay money to see documentaries in a theatrical setting, it helps the next guy.

Just getting into Sundance doesn't mean you should be nominated for an Oscar.  Just paying to play a couple mornings in Santa Monica doesn't mean you should be nominated for an Oscar.  As Betsy McClane wrote on indieWIRE:

The shifting of AMPAS rules is nothing new. As a private club, not a public or not for profit organization, they are entitled to change any rules about any thing that they choose. AMPAS is under no obligation, other than a moral one, to serve any particular part of the film community or the public.

The sky isn't falling (even if a recent Best Documentary winner suggests it might be sooner than we think) and docmakers have a real opportunity to build a grass roots network of venues across the nation wherein filmmakers can accomplish self-distribution.  In future posts, I want to examine this possibility and hope to create a list of theatres, microcinemas and alternative screening venues that are open to self-distributed docs and can help filmmakers fulfill their Academy requirements AND get the theatrical they were hoping for.

Because if you weren't hoping, weren't planning, weren't thinking all along that you'd have a real theatrical, then you shouldn't be thinking Oscar.

Comments

[Jonny Leahan]

Excellent piece, AJ. Thanks for clarifying those rule changes in a language I can understand!

I couldn't agree more... these changes could have the effect of creating a real, national "network" of theaters which support indie docs and give more people more access to more docs.

Curious to see how this all pans out...

[SFguy]

I'm glad to see someone arguing forcefully for theatrical releases of documentaries, but I think this Oscar rule change business is another beast. I was at the San Francisco governor's meeting, when Apted and Epstein appeared to present the rules. And I do say "present" rather than "explain" or "exchange ideas about", because the only helpful part of the event was hearing the rules read out loud in Apted's well-enunciated British accent. I've rarely been to a discussion like that where more contempt and disconnect was displayed toward the very community that was supposed to be represented at this meeting. The ritual response to every point made at the event was "We're not looking for opinions, but facts. Please send us a letter about particular films that would be excluded." As if having opinions at a supposedly open forum about rule changes affecting our community was somehow ludicrous! And Apted in particular displayed an almost pathological antipathy toward what he disdainfully called "TV Documentaries". Every point someone made was rebutted with "Well, we don't want TV documentaries sneaking in". It got to the point where someone asked why narrative films didn't have the same requirements, and Apted replied "Because documentary filmmakers will try to find a way to cheat." This coming from a guy who can't really be considered a documentary filmmaker anymore, certainly not in the same sense you or I would.

Aside from disappointment at the arrogance that permeated the proceedings, the worst thing that comes out of these rules is that the very people Apted seems obsessed with barring from the selection process will barely blink at the rules changes. I have friends who are theater owners, and they've already reported that HBO is basically four walling their requirements away, a process that started within days of the announcement. For the bigger companies, paying a couple thousand dollars more is barely a drop in the marketing budget. But for someone who's self-distributing the film, it might mean the difference between ever making a movie again or not. I commend AJ for having a great run, but I know people who were on the shortlist this year that went to great financial risk and struggle just to get to the 8 theaters, and I doubt very much they'd make 15. This kind of survival of the fittest attitude is always propagated by those at the top of the heap. I'm sure Apted can call any theater anytime and have them program a documentary about his poodle. That's just the way it works in exhibition. I could make the same exact call and pitch to a a theater as a distributor, and they won't listen to a word I say. Because it's so hard to make money for people all down the pipeline, you are going to see a lot of worthy films with tough and less commercial topic rising to the top of the Oscar heap. That's just a fact. And the truth is, that's the case for narrative films too, so we may just have to accept that entertaining and more mainstream docs will carry the day the way they do in the rest of the Oscars. And that's fine, but please don't say that it's for the doc community's sake somehow. These same "cheaters" and "TV documentarists" have been carrying the art of documentary film for decades, with no help from the academy or theaters.

I am glad for the allowances for alternative venues, which may genuinely help. But that is a more complicated and slippery world than it seems, hardly the "Set up a projector and let it fly" panacea. I guarantee there will be quibbles over whether an exhibition was a "true" theatrical run, and someone will be disqualified because those guidelines are so vague.

I will be shocked and amazed (and immensely gratified) if a movie with a primarily digital run makes it onto the shortlist in the ensuing years. How will they compete with an HBO that will snap up regular theaters in any city it chooses? How many narrative films of this nature were nominated? How many "Mutual Appreciation"s and "George Washington"s have been nominated for Best Picture? What this does is just further push doc oscars into that world where money and muscle win the day. And that's fine, has its own power and tradition, but please let's not try to tell the majority of independent filmmakers that this is somehow good for them. They'll just have to find other routes to success, as they always have.

[Karen Cirillo]

"This will make it much more difficult for independent filmmakers’ work to qualify for the Best Documentary Feature Award, while giving an advantage to films distributed by large studios."

Sorry, I love docs and am the first to support them, but why is everyone under the impression that independent films (of any genre) even matter to the Academy? I mean, what independent fiction feature has a shot at being nominated at the Academy Awards? What fiction film gets to be considered when it was made for television (remember when The Last Seduction was barred because of its HBO connection?)?

The rules may or may not be acceptable or feasible for doc filmmakers and the Academy certainly doesn't treat the documentary category with the same respect as everyone else (remember last year when the filmmakers didn't even get to go on stage?) but the Academy Awards piss people off for ALL their decisions.

The real problem here is that an entire nation of excellent filmmakers and excellent films are competing for ONE award that matters. And for that, the results will never satisfy.

[Ira Deutchman]

I would like to point out that Emerging Pictures has 24 digital screens in 23 cities and growing by a few per month. According to last year's rules, our theaters would not have qualified docs for the Oscars, but under this year's rules we do. We've been lobbying the Academy for this change and we're grateful that we can now participate in the process. The next step is to get them to accept that the digital standards they have chosen for Hollywood work are not relevent for independent work. The Oscar should go to the best film, not the wealthiest filmmaker.

[Rtrank]

Many great points made and an important piece. However, I do take exception to Spike Lee's remarks about a film I produced, "The Long Way Home" and suggestions that it wasn't worthy of awards or accolades.

Our film was a selection of the documentary competition of Sundance Film Festival, it won the Chicago Film Festival and was selected by a group of festivals to numerous to list here. Just prior to the Oscars in 1998, Siskel and Ebert gave it their famous "2 thumbs way up" and other critics had it on their top lists.

"The Long Way Home" was made as a theatrical feature and, at a great expense to a non-profit institution, was released theatrically around the United States. We did not have a major distributor working with us. We did it on our own. Whatever monies we received from Showtime, which purchased our film after Sundance, didn't cover what it cost us to do our theatrical release and didn't even cover a fraction of our production costs. When we were nominated for Best Feature Documentary, we did not have the resources to run ads in the trades to promote our film to Academy members. "4 Little Girls", which was an excellent documentary and deserving of all the praise and honors it received, was underwritten by HBO and had promotional ads running in both trade papers almost every day for the 6 weeks leading up to the awards. We couldn't compete with that. People found out about our film by word of mouth.

It is a misconception that films about the Holocaust have won an unusually large number of Oscars.
The Documentary category for the Oscars was created in 1941. The first documentary about the Holocaust to win an Oscar was in 1981, 36 years after the end of World War Two. It took almost 4 decades for a film about the largest mass murder of a people to be honored in this way. To name 2 landmark films about the subject that were overlooked: "Night and Fog" and "The Sorrow and the Pity". If the make-up of the Academy, as Spike Lee maintains, is weighted towards a certain kind of documentary, then what is his explanation for this fact? Between 1981 and 1995, 4 films about the Holocaust were awarded Oscars. From 1995 until the present another 4 films about the Holocaust were awarded Oscars, one of them a Short. Since 2000, only one film about the Holocaust has been nominated. I would venture to say a similiar number of films about nature and the environment, the fight for civil rights, the tragedy of war, as well as docs about art and science have won as many if not more Academy Awards than Holocaust themed non-fiction films.

The non-profit I write and direct for, Moriah Films, continues to be committed to making theatrical documentaries. Our last two features, "Unlikely Heroes" and "Ever Again" played in theatres around the country. Our newest film "I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal" premiered as a selection of the Berlin Film Festival and has also been selected by Tribeca. The new Academy rules will be costly for us but we believe in the importance of making documentaries to be shown in theatres. The discussion about finding a way for all worthy films to meet the new rules is an important one. Denigrating other films and filmmakers takes away from that discussion.

[MS]

Hollywood and the film industry--a town made by Jews, an industry made by Jews, In short, a media industrial complex controlled by Jews. If there is a documentary made about the holocaust that is at best mediocre, it will at least be nominated and most likely win. There is no way around that...unless a documentary is made about Israel. Arthur Cohn is a Zionist. We see his views are supported by the majority creators of the media industrial complex. All other subject matter is secondary. Just hope and pray that if your film is nominated that it is not in competition with any films dealing with Jewish historical or political, cultural subject matter.

[AJ Schnack]

I debated whether to delete the above comment, but decided to leave it because I think that covering up this kind of ignorance does no one any good.

The fact is that in addition to the two landmark films listed in Rtrank's comment, the epic film Shoah was not nominated for Best Documentary, nor have any number of films on the subject which have been made in the last few years. Your paranoia has no basis in truth. But then, you can't expect much from someone who actually spouts nonsense like "a media industrial complex controlled by Jews".

If I can take the topic seriousy for a moment, perhaps the run of Holocaust-themed documentaries winning the Oscar can be attributed to the feeling, after Spielberg's Schindler's List, that it was time to focus attention on this issue for a new generation. We witness today in Darfur the dreadful costs of human beings willing to look the other way when genocide occurs.

[MS]

Schindler's lists glorifies the holocaust to a great degree. Notice how beautifully shot it was....the black and white soft focus etc. This was not an accurate portrayal in this sense. Watch Playing For Time if you want to see the stark reality of this dreadful time. RE: My ignorance: certainly not every film about the holocaust has won an Oscar or even been nominated. However, if you were to count how many have and how many have not, you will certainly find the HAVE's ahead of the game.

RE: Media Industrial Complex: Not paranoia at all. Do some research on this history of propaganda/PR and network, studio ownerships over the last 100 years. You will be pleasantly surprised. I also suggest you watch a documentary called: Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own as a starting point and take a look at the NEO-CON movement. An organization lead by extremist Jews and Christians....

[MS]

Schindler's lists glorifies the holocaust to a great degree. Notice how beautifully shot it was....the black and white soft focus etc. This was not an accurate portrayal in this sense. Watch Playing For Time if you want to see the stark reality of this dreadful time. RE: My ignorance: certainly not every film about the holocaust has won an Oscar or even been nominated. However, if you were to count how many have and how many have not, you will certainly find the HAVE's ahead of the game.

RE: Media Industrial Complex: Not paranoia at all. Do some research on this history of propaganda/PR and network, studio ownerships over the last 100 years. You will be pleasantly surprised. I also suggest you watch a documentary called: Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own as a starting point and take a look at the NEO-CON movement. An organization lead by extremist Jews and Christians....

[eric]

Interesting discussion. But as a Canadian, I have to say I really don't get U.S. doc filmmakers' obsession with the Oscars and theatrical distribution, and disdain for television. All around the world, documentaries are made with the help of television pre-sales. (As indeed are feature films. Look at the credits of European films. Many have Canal+, Channel 4, etc. as part of their financing.) And guess what - the sky hasn't fallen. The Europeans make creative, artistically challeging films.

The Academy is an old men's club that recognizes five feature docs a year. Usually they're not the best films made that year. So, who cares? Focus on TV distribution in the U.S. and abroad, make your money back, and put it into your next film. Why waste your time and energy on money-losing theatrical runs?

Then there's the "feature-length" thing. I've long since lost count of documentaries I've seen that are 60- or even 45-minute films masquerading as features. Filmmakers will go to any lengths to stretch a thin storyline to 75 or even 90 minutes just to make the film "feature length." To what purpose? To put people to sleep? When was the last time you saw a film and said, "boy, I wish that were longer."

Bottom line: the race for the Oscar and the obsession with theatrical runs is not good for the art of documentary film. And I'm not so sure it's good for the commerce either.