By now, with 134 entries for Foreign Language feature, it’s time for the Academy to acknowledge that documentary filmmakers are making an abundance of vital, important films right now. Five slots for Documentary Feature is simply nowhere near enough to honor the groundswell of non-fiction filmmaking. Since mainstream Hollywood seems more inclined towards fantasy, we need documentaries now more than ever. The Documentary category looks the way the feature film category SHOULD look and yet one allows for more than five and the other doesn’t.
Films directed by women are far more common in the documentary field, which would help greatly increase gender equality within the Oscars without breaking a sweat. But five does not adequately reward what is happening in the industry, the country and the world.
Sure, to have ten slightly diminishes how special the usual five are but let’s face it. So much has changed that the more popular documentaries get in while the most important, culture-altering ones do not. Blackfish has caused Sea World to scramble towards ending their barbaric (emphasis mine) practice of capturing and breeding Orcas in captivity yet Blackfish was shut out of the Oscar race. By anyone’s definition that film should have been included. It is the one category that should not come down to publicity, publicists and money and yet every year we see that dynamic play out.
How in the world are voters going to plow through 134 documentaries to pick only five? They never will. They’ll cherry pick the ones they’re either interested in or they’ve heard buzz about. The end result is always predictable and almost always disappointing.
While we’re at it, maybe the Academy ought to consider expanding the directing category from five to ten, since they now have more than five Best Picture nominees. It makes no sense to have five for director and not five for picture. They should expand both to an even ten and forget this herding cats version of choosing between 5 and 10.
If I had things my way I would divide the directing category by sex, the way the acting categories have done. Best Male Director and Best Female Director. That would mean several significant changes. The first, voters could no longer ignore the work of women but would have to acknowledge it to fill five categories. Second, it would help to motivate studios to hire more women to direct their Big Oscar Movies. This would be one of the coolest things anyone has ever done and yet I know it would never happen, the main reason being no one wants to admit that when it comes to filmmaking, there are the trusted directors (men) and the untrustworthy directors (women). This would be blatant affirmative action, in which I am a great believer. Affirmative action exists to provide opportunities to a group that has been systematically shut out, which women clearly have been in Hollywood, particularly Hollywood in 2014.
Imagine if voters had the freedom to choose five women and five men for director this year. Imagine how that would change things – how it would obliterate an ongoing problem. Since we’re splitting Picture and Director anyway, why not open things up for women?
Just a thought.
Neither of these things are likely to happen. The Oscars like things how they are. Very little has changed in the 16 years I’ve been covering them.
What do you think, readers? Good idea or bad idea?
The submitted features, listed in alphabetical order, are:
“Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq”
“Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case”
“Algorithms”
“Alive Inside”
“All You Need Is Love”
“Altina”
“America: Imagine the World without Her”
“American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs”
“Anita”
“Antarctica: A Year on Ice”
“Art and Craft”
“Awake: The Life of Yogananda”
“The Barefoot Artist”
“The Battered Bastards of Baseball”
“Before You Know It”
“Bitter Honey”
“Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity”
“Botso The Teacher from Tbilisi”
“Captivated The Trials of Pamela Smart”
“The Case against 8”
“Cesar’s Last Fast”
“Citizen Koch”
“CitizenFour”
“Code Black”
“Concerning Violence”
“The Culture High”
“Cyber-Seniors”
“DamNation”
“Dancing in Jaffa”
“Death Metal Angola”
“The Decent One”
“Dinosaur 13”
“Do You Know What My Name Is?”
“Documented”
“The Dog”
“E-Team”
“Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me”
“Elena”
“Evolution of a Criminal”
“Fed Up”
“Finding Fela”
“Finding Vivian Maier”
“Food Chains”
“The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden”
“Getting to the Nutcracker”
“Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me”
“Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia”
“The Great Flood”
“The Great Invisible”
“The Green Prince”
“The Hacker Wars”
“The Hadza: Last of the First”
“Hanna Ranch”
“Happy Valley”
“The Hornet’s Nest”
“I Am Ali”
“If You Build It”
“The Immortalists”
“The Internet’s Own Boy”
“Ivory Tower”
“James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge”
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”
“Journey of a Female Comic”
“Keep On Keepin’ On”
“Kids for Cash”
“The Kill Team”
“Korengal”
“La Bare”
“Last Days in Vietnam”
“Last Hijack”
“The Last Patrol”
“Levitated Mass”
“Life Itself”
“Little White Lie”
“Llyn Foulkes One Man Band”
“Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles”
“Manakamana”
“Merchants of Doubt”
“Mission Blue”
“Mistaken for Strangers”
“Mitt”
“Monk with a Camera”
“Nas: Time Is Illmatic”
“National Gallery”
“Next Goal Wins”
“Next Year Jerusalem”
“Night Will Fall”
“No Cameras Allowed”
“Now: In the Wings on a World Stage”
“Occupy the Farm”
“The Only Real Game”
“The Overnighters”
“Particle Fever”
“Pay 2 Play: Democracy’s High Stakes”
“Pelican Dreams”
“The Pleasures of Being Out of Step”
“Plot for Peace”
“Point and Shoot”
“Poverty Inc.”
“Print the Legend”
“Private Violence”
“Pump”
“Rabindranath Tagore – The Poet of Eternity”
“Red Army”
“Remote Area Medical”
“Rich Hill”
“The Rule”
“The Salt of the Earth”
“Shadows from My Past”
“She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry”
“A Small Section of the World”
“Smiling through the Apocalypse – Esquire in the 60s”
“Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon”
“The Supreme Price”
“Tales of the Grim Sleeper”
“Tanzania: A Journey Within”
“This Is Not a Ball”
“Thomas Keating: A Rising Tide of Silence”
“Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People”
“True Son”
“20,000 Days on Earth”
“Unclaimed”
“Under the Electric Sky”
“Underwater Dreams”
“Virunga”
“Waiting for August”
“Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago”
“Warsaw Uprising”
“Watchers of the Sky”
“Watermark”
“We Are the Giant”
“We Could Be King”
“Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger”
“A World Not Ours”