70 Years of Documentaries at the Oscars

Last fall, I edited a short video with clips from pretty much every Oscar-winning documentary since the category’s inception in the early 1940s. I’m thinking about re-editing it with footage from this year’s nominees, but I have been quite occupied with homework, reporting and preparing for the Gass Awards and the Academy Awards. The documentary category started out, ostensibly, to honor achievements in chronicling World War II. Consider the first documentary winner:Churchill’s Island. The British Ministry of Information also received recognition for “its vivid and dramatic presentation of the heroism of the RAF in the documentary film, Target for Tonight.” It was a different time, to be sure, much different from the era decades later that produced films which vehemently opposed the Vietnam War.

Thematically, the Academy originally favored World War II and nature documentaries, which are really the same thing at their core. Only in the mid-1950s did films like Helen Keller in Her Story and Men against the Arctic receive any sort of recognition. The Academy proved it could be timely with its 1964 documentary short winner, Nine from Little Rock, the first of Charles Guggenheim’s four Oscars. Sometimes the Academy gets it wrong, but more often than not, the films reflect contemporary cultural or social concerns. I’ve been following the Oscars with intensity since 1998, but I didn’t start caring about the documentary category until I saw a Penelope Spheeris film package during the 2002 ceremony. Michael Moore’s controversial win and speech the following year cemented my interest in and respect for the documentary category, and it has only grown since that night.

The documentary categories are changing—new rules stipulate that contenders must be advertised in prominent New York and Los Angeles publications prior to and during their theatrical run in those cities. Apparently, the rest of the country doesn’t matter. But I digress.

This year’s documentary feature category is one of the more unpredictable ones in recent memory. It has usually been one of the first categories I can nail down once the nominees are announced. I tweeted Kristopher Tapley, who maintains the awards blog In Contention, asking him which film was most likely to win. He replied that If a Tree Falls and Undefeated are the current favorites. He said the former is more likely, but I’m not so sure about the category this year. There are some great documentaries on the list, but there are also some that were puzzlingly left out in the cold.

My proposal? Expand the documentary feature category, and present the docs later in the night.

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