All these wonderful things

Charles Ferguson Wins the DGA Documentary Award for INSIDE JOB

Saturday night in Los Angeles, Charles Ferguson picked up the DGA Award for INSIDE JOB, winning top honors from a field that included Davis Guggenheim (WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN'), Alex Gibney (CLIENT 9), Lixin Fan (LAST TRAIN HOME) and Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger (RESTREPO).

The presentation of the award picked up some unexpected humor/irony as presenter Helen Mirren lamented the poor financial state of documentary filmmakers just before presenting the award to Ferguson, who a decade ago sold his software company to Microsoft for more than $100 million dollars.

The DGA win is an important one for the Oscar-nominated INSIDE JOB, which was regarded as this year's Oscar favorite after its debut last May at Cannes, but which, in terms of major awards, had only scored a New York Film Critics Circle prize prior to Saturday, where it narrowly topped the surging EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (also Oscar-nommed).  EXIT director Banksy was not nominated for the DGA award.

Other than the NYFCC, the few times that INSIDE JOB has gone head-to-head with EXIT, neither film came out the victor.  Both were nominated for Audience Choice and Production at the Cinema Eye Honors (JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK and LAST TRAIN HOME took those awards, respectively, although EXIT did win two awards including Outstanding Nonfiction Feature) and for the Broadcast Film Critics Award (where WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN' won).  JOB was nomned for the Gotham Award, but lost out to THE OATH.

DGA Nominates Fan, Ferguson, Gibney, Guggenheim, Hetherington & Junger for Doc Award

The Directors Guild has announced its nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary for 2010 and indieWIRE has the list.

In short - many of the big names left standing on Oscar's Documentary Shortlist are noted by the DGA: Charles Ferguson for INSIDE JOB, Alex Gibney for CLIENT 9, Davis Guggenheim for WAITING FOR 'SUPERMAN' and Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger for RESTREPO.  The fifth nominee is Lixin Fan, whose LAST TRAIN HOME leads all nominees for next Tuesday's Cinema Eye Honors.

The DGA rarely syncs up with the Oscars - last year's win by THE COVE's Louie Psihoyos at both is the exception that proves the rule - and usually includes at least one wild card nominee that seemingly comes out-of-the-blue.  Not this time, however, as the DGA went more mainstream in their choices than is their tradition.

The DGA Awards take place Saturday, January 29 in Los Angeles.

 

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and INSIDE JOB Have the Momentum After a Weekend of Critics Awards

With critics awards season officially in high gear, two Oscar shortlisted films are feeling some momentum today, while some critics groups pointedly chose films that weren't on the Academy's shortlist (for varying reasons).

Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP and Charles Ferguson's INSIDE JOB picked up multiple mentions (some wins, some honorable mentions, some nominations) from the various critics groups.

EXIT enjoyed victories from the New York Film Critics Online and the Indiana Film Critics, while being named runner-up by the Los Angeles Film Critics and the Southeastern Film Critics.  It also snagged a Broadcast Film Critics nomination.  There's little question that EXIT is having the best awards season of any nonfiction film - in addition to its critics prizes it was nommed for 6 Cinema Eye Honors, the IDA's Feature Doc Prize and the Spirit Awards' doc prize.  It's the only film on the Academy shortlist to be nominated for more than one of the other big documentary awards.  And now it's enjoying the best run with film critics to date.

INSIDE JOB had been having a surprisingly quiet awards season up until today, when it won both the New York Film Critics and the Southeastern Film Critics.  Earlier in the weekend it picked up Runner-Up from the Boston Film Critics and also picked up a Broadcast Film Critics nomination.

While we're talking about the shortlist and awards - we should note that, while its unlikely to pick up any film critics mentions (due to its airing on HBO this summer), GASLAND had its own major achievement this weekend, when New York Governor David Paterson announced a temporary moratorium on natrual gas fracking.  It would be hard to argue that the governor's action (and the massive grassroots campaign that led to it) weren't spurred in large part by Josh Fox' shortlisted film.  And in the "timing is everything" department, note that GASLAND's DVD comes out tomorrow.

Meanwhile, note that both the LA Film Critics and the Boston Film Critics opted to give their prizes to films conspicuously not included on the Academy's Documentary Feature shortlist - Boston gave two prizes to Jeff Malmberg's MARWENCOL (which opted to forego the Academy push over costs required by the Oscar rules) and the Los Angeles Film Critics went with Lixin Fan's LAST TRAIN HOME.  Both of those films (along with EXIT) are vying for multiple awards, including Outstanding Feature at Cinema Eye.

Here's a recap of what happened this weekend and how it affected the shortlisted films:

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.

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.