All these wonderful things

Bar-Lev, Ferguson, Hetherington, Junger & Weyermann Among 10 Invited to Join Academy

[Filmmakers Amir Bar-Lev (left) and Tim Hetherington at the Cinema Eye Honors Nominees Reception in January in New York City.  Photo by Simon Luethi.]

In what constitutes the largest, single-year class of invites to the Academy's Documentary Branch in years, ten have been invited to join AMPAS, including recently minted Oscar winner Charles Ferguson, filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev (MY KID COULD PAINT THAT, THE TILLMAN STORY), Participant Media EVP Diane Weyermann and Davis Guggenheim's producing partner Leslie Chilcott.

The headline, though, was the Academy's invitation to RESTREPO filmmakers' Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger.  It's almost unheard of for the Academy to invite filmmakers based on a single feature film, even if it's Oscar nominated, and is almost certainly a reaction to Hetherington's death in Libya two months ago.  Hetherington is the Academy's first posthumous invitee.

The invite list also includes Carl Deal, whose partner on TROUBLE THE WATER, Tia Lessin, was invited to join a couple years ago, as well as three recently nominated for the Academy's Documentary Short prize: Jon Alpert (CHINA'S UNNATURAL DISASTER: THE TEARS OF THE SICHUAN PROVINCE) and Thomas Lennon & Ruby Yang (THE WARRIORS OF QIUGANG), who won the Short Oscar a few years ago for THE BLOOD OF THE YINGZHOU DISTRICT.

The Day Before: Predicting This Year's Oscar Doc Feature Nods

Early tomorrow morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will unveil the five feature films that will stand as this year's Documentary Feature representatives on Oscar night.  We've been talking for months about what a great year this has been for documentary - and it was amazing last week to be able to celebrate that year at Cinema Eye - but for many folks, it's this list of five that will forever stand for the year in documentary 2010.

But who makes the list?

One thing that many Oscar watchers miss about this part of the Documentary Feature voting is that the process allows branch members to show their support, as well as their dislike, of each of the 15 films on the shortlist.  Voters have ranked all 15 films on a scale of 6-10, with 6 being the lowest.  If there's more than a couple voters (and it may not even take that many) who give that low score of "6" to a film, it's enough to remove it from contention.

And because the vote is cast in secret without a jury or committee process to allow for cajoling and persuasion, in theory at least, voters can feel safe scoring down a film without needing to justify it to the group.

But there's no telling whether the voters - nearly all of them documentary filmmakers themselves - will actually hand out those low grades.

That's what makes this year - with some films that provoke very strong reactions - particularly difficult to call. 

Since Oscar's final five has never been - in its history - culled from the top five money makers, it's highly unlikely that you will see a list of five drawn exclusively from the top hits: WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN', INSIDE JOB, EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, RESTREPO and THE TILLMAN STORY. 

Here on the blog, we look at history and note that it's likely that three of these top films will make the list - and we'd frankly be lying to you if we said with any assurity which three films it will be.

The Most Honored Documentary of 2010 is EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

After a full year in which Laura Poitras' THE OATH and Jeff Malmberg's MARWENCOL dominated our Nonfiction Feature Honor Roll with a full slate of festival jury prizes and year-end documentary awards, the onslaught of 2010's various film critics honors have handed the mantle of most honored documentary of the year to Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.

EXIT now has a full 24 mentions on the Honor Roll - a combination of year-end documentary award nominations and critics prizes - which is 8 ahead of the 2nd place film, MARWENCOL and 10 ahead of Poitras' THE OATH and fellow Oscar shortlisted doc, Charles Ferguson's INSIDE JOB.

Three other Oscar shortlisted features - Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's RESTREPO, Amir Bar-Lev's THE TILLMAN STORY and Davis Guggenheim's WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN' have 12 mentions each. 

After being absent from the list for most of the year (the film played out of competition at Sundance and Berlin), EXIT sprinted to the top of the Honor Roll chart on the basis of a somewhat surprising critical consensus - surprising not on the merits but because critics have tended to award issue-based docs over more entertaining fare.  Even last year when ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL was making a strong year-end showing among some critics, in the end the awards tended to favor the eventual Oscar winner, Louie Psihoyos' THE COVE. 

A Week of Awards Confirms That It's a Wide Open Oscar Race

If anyone thought that the first week of year-end film awards was going to help settle on a frontrunner for the Documentary Feature Oscar, they were mistaken.

In fact, the scattershot results only confirmed that this year's race is the most wide-open contest in years.

First, the Gothams settled on shockingly-out-of-the-race THE OATH for their documentary prize winner.  Next, as they announced their nods, the Spirits bypassed heavyweights like INSIDE JOB and WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN', settling instead on shortlisted titles like EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and RESTREPO.

Then Thursday, the National Board of Review, which has a shockingly good record as an Oscar predictor in the past decade, handed its top docu prize to Davis Guggenheim's 'SUPERMAN' and annointed A FILM UNFINISHED, INSIDE JOB, JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK, RESTREPO and THE TILLMAN STORY as runners-up. 

The next day, the Producers Guild named six nominees for their Documentary Award: CLIENT 9, EARTH MADE OF GLASS, INSIDE JOB, SMASH HIS CAMERA, THE TILLMAN STORY and 'SUPERMAN'.  Only Deborah Scranton's EARTH and Leon Gast's SMASH weren't on the Academy Shortlist.

Later that night, Lucy Walker's WASTE LAND recieved the most votes from the IDA membership and won that organization's top prize, besting EXIT.

But the next day, both WASTE LAND and EXIT lost out at the British Independent Film Awards - with the victory going to shortlisted doc ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE.

Then, over the weekend, the DC Film Critics became the first critics group to weigh in, naming their nominees on Saturday and their winners on Sunday.  The five nominees were all shortlisters: EXIT, INSIDE JOB, RESTREPO, TILLMAN and 'SUPERMAN' - and the winner was Banksy's EXIT.

Finally, at Sunday's European Film Awards, the Documentary prize went to Patricio Guzman's NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT (the other two nominees were ARMADILLO and STEAM OF LIFE).

And as critics are now weighing in with their lists of top films (in addition to their awards), we should note that Sight and Sound's list of films of 2010 includes several documentaries, including THE ARBOR (#5), THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF NICOLAE CEAUSESCU and NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIST (tied at #8) and EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (tied at #20).

New York Magazine's David Edelstein also weighed in, listing 4 docs in a top 11 for the year: CLIENT 9 and INSIDE JOB tied at #2, EXIT at #8 and MARWENCOL at #9.

The coming week is a bit quieter, but next weekend we get the Boston, Los Angeles and New York critics to weigh in one after the other.

So if you're tallying at home, here's how the week went for the Shortlisted films:

WASTE LAND Takes Top Prize at IDA Awards

A long night at Los Angeles' DGA Theater - punctuated by warm and sometimes biting humor from host Morgan Spurlock and an ace acceptance speech by Pioneer Award winners Alan and Susan Raymond - ended with the International Documentary Associations Documentary Feature Award going to Lucy Walker's WASTE LAND. 

It was the first time that the IDA had opened up its final voting to its general membership (nominees were determined by blue ribbon panels), which gave an edge to the audience pleasing WASTE LAND over its fellow nominees EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, THE OATH, STEAM OF LIFE and SWEETGRASS.

In fact, it's the latest in a long series of awards - including numerous Audience prizes - for WASTE LAND, which chronicles what happens when Brazilian artist Vik Muniz creates large scale portraits of garbage dump pickers using materials found at the dump.  We've long been forecasting a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination for the film, which was shortlisted last month.  WASTE LAND also received the IDA's Pare Lorentz Prize, one of several awards whose winner was announced prior to the event.

The award for Documentary Short went to Kiran Deol's WOMAN REBEL, which is also on the Academy's short list in its category. 

Cinema Eye Screening Series at Cinefamily Kicks Off Tonight with EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP

The latest round of the Cinema Eye Screening Series - "What's Up Docs?" - at LA's Cinefamily (the old Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax) begins tonight with a screening of Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP, on the eve of the film's nomination at Friday's IDA Awards.  After the screening, I'll talk to producer Jaimie D'Cruz, editor Chris King and executive producer Holly Cushing about the making of what is certainly the most talked about, dissected and debated documentary of 2010.

We'll follow this up next Thursday, December 9, with a screening of GASLAND, with director Josh Fox in person after the film and once again on Thursday, December 16, with THE TILLMAN STORY, with director Amir Bar-Lev.

All three films are on the Academy's shortlist for Best Feature Documentary and all are nominated for this year's Cinema Eye Honors.

For tickets and more information, check out the Cinefamily website.

As Critics Prepare to Weigh in, THE OATH and MARWENCOL Still Lead Honor Roll

Think of it as a different kind of shortlist. 

The Academy weighed in their list of 15 films that will move forward in the Oscar race.  Some of those titles have done really well in awards and nominations leading up to the Granddaddy of them all while others haven't made a blip on the radar until now.

On our annual Nonfiction Feature Honor Roll, we usually find that things really begin to coallesce as the year ends.  Thus far we've heard from festival juries & audiences, and we've got nominees for each of the year's other big nonfiction awards (Spirits, Cinema Eye, IDA & Gothams).Starting today, with the National Board of Review weighing in on the year's best films, we'll start hearing from critics groups and then the various guilds.

But if we were to take the information we have to date - which 15 films would make the Honor Roll shortlist?  [We'll give you a hint - only 6 of the 15 are on the Academy's shortlist.]

Oscar Goes Bigger for 2011: EXIT & 4 Other Million Dollar Grossers Lead Shortlist Pack

Yesterday afternoon, the Academy announced its documentary shortlist.  As we mentioned at the time, the headline was that EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP had defied most of the odds to hurdle what we thought would be the most difficult barrier stopping it from winning the Oscar - making the shortlist at all - while the most shocking snub was the failure to advance Laura Poitras' THE OATH, a film that we had pegged as a frontrunner and which had already been nominated for the top award at Cinema Eye, the IDA and the Gothams.

But more about those in a minute.

So, first off, it's not a terrible list.  I've seen a few folks contend that it's off-the-charts bad, and trust me, I've seen off-the-charts bad, and this isn't that.

It's curious, that's certain, but mostly because it's actually the kind of list that I think the Academy has been hoping for for years - a slick, brassy list of 15 that's chockablock full of big films and big directors: there's 5 million-dollar grossers in the bunch (the first time that has ever happened) and that doesn't include the headline-grabbing films about Pat Tillman and Eliot Spitzer and natural gas fracking, nor a just-opening, crowd-pleasing film about Brazilian garbage workers.

That makes at least 9 high-profile titles out of 15, which explains why a number of Oscar prognosticators felt pretty good about this year's list (and their pre-announcement predictions, which had centered on films that had a big theatrical launch and therefore that they'd actually heard of - not usually a good barometer).

A lot of these are big productions, too (which makes sense when you consider that Best Picture at the Oscars goes to the producers, not the directors), and for the first time in several years, many if not most of the big players seem to have a horse in the race - Sony Pictures Classics, Weinstein Co., HBO, NatGeo, Magnolia, Paramount, Cinetic, Oscilloscope (those that don't, like Roadside, either weren't really in the doc game this year or, like Zeitgeist and IFC, missed out with their own high profile titles).

And there are big name directors - two Oscar winners (Gibney and Guggenheim) and another nominee (Charles Ferguson), not to mention perhaps the world's most famous anonymous street artist.

This is the kind of shiny list that a lot of people can be (and likely are) pretty happy with, both inside and outside the Academy.

There are always going to be "snubs".  It's getting so that I dislike even using the word, because a "snub" almost implies that there's something unusual going on.  But if there are 3-5 or more "snubs" every year, it hardly seems novel.  Feels like we need a different word.

2010 Academy Awards Documentary Feature Shortlist

The headline: Banksy's In, THE OATH and Frederick Wiseman are Out

 

Here's the list.  More to come later...

 

CLIENT 9: THE RISE AND FALL OF ELIOT SPITZER
Directed by Alex Gibney

 

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
Directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath

 

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
Directed by Banksy

 

GASLAND
Directed by Josh Fox

 

GENIUS WITHIN: THE INNER LIFE OF GLENN GOULD

Directed by Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont

 

INSIDE JOB
Directed by Charles Ferguson

 

THE LOTTERY
Directed by Madeleine Sackler

 

PRECIOUS LIFE
Directed by Shlomi Eldar

 

QUEST FOR HONOR
Directed by Mary Ann Smothers Bruni

 

RESTREPO
Directed by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger

 

THIS WAY OF LIFE
Directed by Thomas Burstyn

 

THE TILLMAN STORY
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev

 

WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN'
Directed by Davis Guggenheim

 

WASTE LAND
Directed by Lucy Walker

 

WILLIAM KUNSTLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE
Directed by Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kuntsler

LAST TRAIN HOME, ARMADILLO, EXIT, MARWENCOL & THE OATH Lead 2011 Cinema Eye Nominations

Nominations were just announced at Sheffield Doc/Fest in the United Kingdom for the 4th Annual Cinema Eye Honors and the film with the most nominations is Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME, garnering 7 nominations, tying the record set previously by WALTZ WITH BASHIR and THE COVE.

Nominated with LAST TRAIN HOME for Outstanding Feature Film is Janus Metz' ARMADILLO, Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (both with six nominations), Jeff Malmberg's MARWENCOL and Laura Poitras' THE OATH (which each garnered four nods).

Fan, Malmberg, Metz and Poitras were nominated for Outstanding Direction with legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman for LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET.  Wiseman is having a career resurgence with LA DANSE (which was nominated in three categories) and his new film BOXING GYM.

THE OATH has now been nominated for each of the major year end documentary prizes to date (Gothams and IDA previously).  EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP was also nominated for Best Documentary by the IDA.  MARWENCOL, which declined to pursue an Oscar nomination over the cost of fulfilling the Academy's requirements, was recently named the recipient of the IDA's Emerging Filmmaker Award.

It's the first year end awards recognition from ARMADILLO, which premiered at Cannes and has been a box office sensation in its native Denmark but is just having its US premiere tonight at DOC NYC, and LAST TRAIN HOME, which took top prize at IDFA last year and has seen steady theatrical business in the US and Canada.

Charles Ferguson's INSIDE JOB, considered by many to be the Oscar favorite, received three nominations, including a nod for Outstanding Production.  Ferguson was nominated previously for Cinema Eye for his debut film NO END IN SIGHT.

CATFISH, A FILM UNFINISHED, INTO ETERNITY, THE RED CHAPEL, RESTREPO, THE SOUND OF INSECTS - SECRET OF A MUMMY and SWEETGRASS all had two nominations.

From an international perspective, the nominations are dominated by Danish documentaries.  In addition to ARMADILLO, both INTO ETERNITY and THE RED CHAPEL are nominated for Outstanding International Feature (the other nominees are EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and LAST TRAIN HOME).  

A full list of nominees is after the jump.