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Our Oscar and Spirit Awards Predictions

With Los Angeles abuzz in pre-Oscar festivities, it seems that it's become time to weigh in on this year's awards and to offer a few predictions about who might go home with some hardware.

Saturday afternoon, amidst what is predicted to be a stormy and cold Spirit Awards under the tent in Santa Monica, it seems safe to say that the Documentary Feature award will go to either EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP or RESTREPO.  The history of the Spirit Awards is that, in the documentary category at least, exposure/box office potency = the win. Only twice in the ten years of the Best Documentary award has the winner not been a film with the highest box office take - last year was one of those when ANVIL! topped FOOD, INC.

[Check out our list of all of the Spirit Awards nominees and winners in the documentary categories here.]

With that said, it's hard to imagine that the FIND membership will go with MARWENCOL or SWEETGRASS, which had lower-profile theatrical releases, or to THUNDER SOUL, which is set to be released by Roadside Attractions this fall.

Just by tradition alone, you'd have to pick EXIT as the winner here.  It grossed about three times the amount that RESTREPO did, and it fits in with the pop culture themes that tend to win on Saturday (i.e. previous winners DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS, SOME KIND OF MONSTER, ANVIL!).  A non-pop culture, vérite-style film, which, aside from a sprinkling of interviews with the subjects, RESTREPO is, hasn't won the Documentary award at the Spirits since 2000 (DARK DAYS).

Note: MARWENCOL and SWEETGRASS, along with SUMMER PASTURE, were nominated for the Spirit Awards' grant prize, the Truer Than Fiction Award, which recognizes upcoming nonfiction filmmakers (and which has been won in the past by Bill and Turner Ross (45365), Margaret Brown (THE ORDER OF MYTHS) and Ian Olds & Garrett Scott (OPERATION: DREAMLAND).  For the first time in the Spirit Awards history, this award (along with the other grant prizes for upcoming narrative filmmaker and producer) will not be announced during the Spirit Awards themselves - they were shifted to a brunch event that took place in January.  MARWENCOL was named as this year's winner.

So, if EXIT looks like a straight-away winner at the Spirit Awards, then the question is whether Banksy and Jaimie D'Cruz triumph on Sunday afternoon in the Kodak Theatre.

Belieb It! Justin Bieber's 3D Concert Doc #2 Nonfiction Opening Weekend All Time

WIth estimates of the $30M weekend, the new Paramount 3D concert documentary JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER jumped onto the list of the top 10 nonfiction features of all time (it currently stands at #8) and is now the number two concert film ever, behind MICHAEL JACKSON'S THIS IS IT.

The weekend take is the second highest weekend gross for a nonfiction film in history, after last year's JACKASS 3D, which was also distributed by Paramount.  For comparison, THIS IS IT had a $23M opening weekend (although it launched on a Wednesday and had already banked $13M by the time the weekend arrived).  JACKASS 3D opened with an astounding $50M back in October.

NEVER SAY NEVER was directed by John Chu (who had previous worked on Disney's STEP UP movies).  Chu replaced Academy Award winner Davis Guggenhim, who had been attached to the project but dropped out reportedly to focus on the release of WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN'.  Coincidentally, the film that NEVER SAY NEVER knocks out of the top ten all-time is Guggenheim's AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH.

Nomination Dispute on Oscar Doc Short POSTER GIRL Ignites Divisive Fight at the Academy

For most of the world, the press release sent out by the Academy one week ago today seemed simple and direct.  Headed "Oscar Credits Determined for Documentary Short Subjects", the release was only somewhat notable in that it announced the first Oscar nomination for Mitchell Block, a veteran player and somewhat controversial figure in the documentary world, for the short film POSTER GIRL, which was directed by Sara Nesson.

But what seemed simple on the outside masked an fierce dispute within the Academy's Documentary Branch.  Two different committees had ruled that Block had not done enough work on the film to qualify for an Oscar nod, but those decisions were overturned by a four-person review committee that represented the Academy's Board of Governors.  How and why the decision went to the four-person committee is at the crux of the conflict.

Perhaps none of this would be known outside of the Academy if Freida Lee Mock, the Oscar winning filmmaker and former Doc Branch Governor, had not emailed some of the details to Roger Ebert, who last Friday wrote about the dispute and then quickly deleted the blog post, reportedly after hearing from Movie City News' David Poland.  By late Friday afternoon, all that remained was Poland's own post, which was sympathetic to Block and critical of Mock, but which remained somewhat vague as to what actually happened.

While Poland suggested that the situation was a smear job against Block, conversations with a number of Academy members over the weekend reveal a much more complicated - and a far more divisive - battle than has been publicly made known.  And while the heart of the dispute rests with the Academy's real desire to limit inappropriate producer credits, it's set against a backdrop of a series of personal grudges that date back to the late 1980s.

For Your Consideration: EXIT For the Win

With screenings of this year's Oscar nominated documentary features coming to a close and ballots about to be turned in, I took some time over the last few days to think about this year's nominated films and which film should stand as the film to represent 2010, which was, by any measure, a remarkable year in nonfiction filmmaking.

One thing that surprises is the fact that most of this year's nominees are newcomers to documentary (even if they've had great success in other fields).  Banksy is one of the world's best known street artists, Sebastian Junger is a noted author and journalist, Tim Hetherington is a respected cinematographer and Josh Fox has led a successful theater company in New York for more than a decade.  It is somewhat strange to realize that Lucy Walker, now with four documentary features under her belt, is the Grande Dame of the category, or that Charles Ferguson becomes that rarest of documentary creatures - Oscar nominated for his debut and his sophomore effort.

Some of these filmmakers I know quite well.  Some I've just met during the past year.  Some I may never meet and will only know through email exchanges.  And while personal relationships can complicate writing a piece like this, I felt that a year like 2010 required going on record.  So, here are my thoughts on the films that will forever stand as representative of last year, at least at the Academy, along with my pick - which if you've been paying close attention over the last six months (not that you should), probably won't come as much of a surprise.