Thomas Butt is a senior writer at Collider who focuses on classic movies.
Earning an Academy Award is the highest honor imaginable for an actor, writer, director, or below-the-line craftsperson. The awards body represents cinema in all its glorious forms, but only if you're a specific kind of motion picture.
Although the Academy has increased and diversified its voting pool in the last decade, the Oscars are synonymous with a certain type of film and repeatedly ignore entire genres and modes of filmmaking. At this point, the Oscars are as synonymous with egregious snubs as they are statuettes and acceptance speeches, but one constant throughline across nearly 100 years of the ceremony remains unforgivable. While the Oscars give the medium its due with a separate category, documentaries are merely an afterthought for Best Picture voters. Somehow, a nonfiction film has never received a nomination for Best Picture, even in the era where 10 slots are required for the category. The snubbing of profound works of investigation and human and historical examination, movies like Harlan County, USA, Hoop Dreams, and No Other Land, tells you everything you need to know about the fraught voting process and myopic view of the Oscars. Documentaries are Restricted to Their Own Category by the Oscars If there's another genre/format that can relate to the dismissal of documentaries, it is animation, with only three fully animated films ever receiving a Best Picture nomination. When Beauty and the Beast broke the glass ceiling as one of the five nominees in 1992, it should've ushered in a new movement of diversified nominees. Instead, only two animated movies have since earned this coveted nod. On the flip side, we've seen a flux of foreign language films receiving Best Picture recognition, including one winner, Parasite. Documentaries are still waiting for their due as serious contenders alongside the narrative films that dominate the awards campaign and ceremony. The format, like animation, is given two categories, honoring the best short and feature-length documentaries, which has led to it becoming more or less segregated from the rest of the show, and lobbying to break the barrier between Best Documentary and Best Picture feels futile. Furthermore, documentaries, because they don't feature actors or screenwriters, won't be eligible for any other major categories nor receive support from precursor guild ceremonies like the WGA and SAG awards. When it comes time to vote for Best Picture, the documentary branch is massively outweighed by the rest of the Academy, with members openly admitting that they don't watch all the movies they vote for. Oscar voting has been a fraught process for years, so much so that venerated critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert intervened and overhauled how voting operates following the egregious ignoring of their beloved Hoop Dreams, the 1994 documentary about Chicago teens' aspirations of basketball stardom, which was appallingly even snubbed for Best Documentary. Siskel and Ebert's activism, which led to a separate documentary voting branch within the Academy, was on the heels of other controversial snubs, including Shoah, The Thin Blue Line, Paris is Burning, and Crumb. Related Roger Ebert Was So Angered By This Documentary's Oscars Snub, He Kickstarted an Awards Revolution Ebert's ire led to a whole new Academy branch. Posts By Shane Vassar The Importance of Nominating Documentaries for Best Picture The Academy receives flak for not capturing the zeitgeist of film culture in Best Picture, but it pales in comparison to the wide range of head-scratching snubs in the documentary field, some of which represent the myopic tendencies of the voting body. It would likely fare better today, but Hoop Dreams' study of impoverished Black families who experienced the myth of the American Dream didn't seem important enough for privileged voters. Fahrenheit 9/11, a surprise Palme d'Or winner and box-office triumph, was at the center of discussion in 2004, but the Oscars' dismissal of the film felt strategic rather than a subjective opinion. In a period of outward patriotism post-September 11th, Michael Moore's anti-George W. Bush provocations would've been in poor taste. The polemic director's Best Documentary acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine, where he was booed off the stage, did little to help his case. Woodstock and Harland County, USA won their dedicated category, but their examination of contemporary cultural trends and labor felt alien to the closed-off voters. Subscribe to the newsletter for Oscars documentary debates Deepen your perspective: subscribe to the newsletter for thoughtful analysis, context, and industry viewpoints on documentary exclusion at the Oscars and broader film culture debates that shape recognition. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept Valnet’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime. With the Academy having evolved drastically in the last decade, there's no excuse for the lack of documentary representation in the Best Picture field. While more contemporary-focused fiction films like Anora and The Substance can earn major nominations, documentaries tap into the current moment more than any medium. It may have soured the joyous and celebratory mood, but nominating No Other Land, capturing the destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, would've felt socially impactful. This continuing trend also signals that the majority of voters would rather congratulate themselves rather than the documentary filmmakers predominantly operating outside the studio apparatus. In a time when fiction and distortion of reality run supreme in business and politics, the Academy has a responsibility to reinforce the invaluable power of documentary filmmaking. Whether it involves unearthing a story about marginalized people or re-examining history, the medium is profound enough that it doesn't need a trophy, but the ceremony could elevate its mass consumption with a proper spotlight in Best Picture.
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