Why the Documentary Oscar Is So Impossible to Predict

Documentary producer and director Joe Berlinger is old enough to remember multiple “golden ages” of documentaries at the box office. There was the one in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Berlingers and Bruce Sinofskys film Brothers Keeper and others, like Hoop Dreams and The Thin Blue Line, made enough cultural impact—and ensuing controversy over their Oscar snubs for best feature—that the Academy eventually established a documentary branch. And there was the other one in the mid-00s, dominated by penguins and Michael Moore.

Now, were living through another, driven by the astonishing summer box-office runs of three films: Morgan Nevilles Mister Rogers film, Wont You Be My Neighbor? (Focus Features), Julie Cohen and Betsy Wests tribute to the Supreme Court justice RBG (Magnolia Pictures/Participant Media), and Tim Wardles twisty family saga, Three Identical Strangers (Neon). Coming right on their heels was the September release Free Solo (National Geographic Documentary Films), the gripping film by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi about climber Alex Honnold.

And yet, when the Academy Award nominations for best documentary feature are announced on January 22, there is a decent chance that at least one of these films wont be included. With the number of qualifying films continuing to grow—for the 2017 Oscars it was 170, up from 145 the year before—and the documentary branch adding new members, its become increasingly difficult to know just what the documentary voters are looking for. A year after the heavily promoted but un-nominated Jane Goodall documentary Jane was passed over at the Oscars, can anyone really be confident that Ruth Bader Ginsburg wont be?

Snubs are literally older than the documentary branch itself. Errol Morriss The Thin Blue Line, Berlinger and Sinofskys Brothers Keeper, and, perhaps most notoriously, Steve Jamess Hoop Dreams were all left out of their respective years nominations before the Academy founded the documentary branch, in 2001, ensuring that only documentarians vote to determine the nominees, instead of the volunteer-based group of Academy members who had previously voted in the category. “Before,” said Berlinger (one of the earliest members of the documentary branch), “it wasnt a fair read, and a very small number of people actually made those decisions.”

The documentary-branch rules have changed many times over the years and since the 2012 awards have allowed the entire branch—not just a select committee—to vote on the short list as well as the final nominees. “The good thing was that the committees watched every film that qualified, so there were often unusual choices that popped up on the short list even though they werent popular, ” said Marshall Curry, a documentary-branch member who has been nominated twice. “The bad part of that, though, was that if one or two people on a committee didnt like a film—say, they disliked Michael Moore—they could torpedo a popular film that clearly should have been on the short list. Now the short list rarely includes a big surprise, and it also rarely includes a striking snub. Its more conventional.”

But snubs have persisted. The glaring absence from the 2005 Oscar short list was Werner Herzogs Grizzly Man; at the 2011 awards, it was Steve James, again, with The Interrupters. Speaking to The New Yorker in 2012 about the short-list updates, Michael Moore described the categorys history of snubbing directors like the Maysles brothers (who were nominated once, for a 1974 short) and Frederick Wiseman “as if Spielberg, Scorsese, and Kubrick had never been nominated for an Oscar.” Wiseman, who won an honorary Oscar in 2016, has still never been nominated.

The documentary Oscar has moved far from the days when a series of obliging Holocaust films—three in a four-year span in the late 90s—seemed to win every season. It has been a staging ground for the slow wooing of the Academy by Netflix, which earned its first Oscar nomination in the category at the 2013 awards and its first win at the 2016 event, for the documentary short “The White Helmets.” And, like nearly every other branch of the Academy, it became caught up in the Weinstein Companys quest for Oscar dominance; the company won the 2011 Oscar for T. J. Martin and Dan Lindsays sports documentary, Undefeated, which it had picked up at the SXSW Film Festival.

“Sometimes it feels like you just get caught in the middle of a battle thats been fought for years,” Martin said of the experience. “We were the lucky ones—we were really lucky to have that level of support, both financially and in terms of brand recognition.”

Berlinger and Sinofsky were nominated the same year, and for the first time, for Paradise Lost 3, the conclusion to their decades-spanning project about the falsely accused West Memphis Three. Berlinger remembers a whisper campaign accusing his project of being too closely linked to television, since it aired on HBO soon after its film-festival premiere. After Undefeated, a film Berlinger said he admires, was announced as the winner, Berlinger and his wife retreated to the bar in the Hollywood & Highland Center, where he ran into Bob Weinstein: “He slapped his hand on my back and said, We stole that one from you, Berlinger! ”

The Weinsteins are gone, but the money and occasional gamesmanship have not left the documentary race. “The unfortunate reality is it is a competitive space,” Martin said. “If youre not constantly doing screenings and being seen, you kind of fall through the cracks. I think the problem is theres no balance between those trying to look at the merit of the work on its own in conjunction with who has a better marketing platform. Unfortunately, more times than not, the marketing aspect of it actually wins.”

Jane, however, had one of the most lavish marketing campaigns of any documentary that year and still came away with nothing. In a piece for The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, director, producer, and writer Adam Benzine—whose short-subject documentary, “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah,” was nominated for the 2015 award—posited that documentary-branch voters left Jane off their ballots to clear space for something smaller. “A lot of documentarians didnt want to believe that was the case,” Benzine said. “The documentary community is still very supportive of each other, but they negatively campaign against each other just as much as the best-picture people campaign against each other.”

Martin, who is a first-time Academy voter this year, says only that he plans to vote for what moves him. And Curry has faith in his fellow branch members willingness to let genuine affection determine their choices. “For the most part, I think doc-branch voters vote for films that they truly love,” Curry said. “And they are happy when a documentary they like breaks through and becomes popular.”

That could mean good news for Wont You Be My Neighbor?, Three Identical Strangers, RBG, and Free Solo. But a surprise seems inevitable—not only because, with four hits competing, theres not much room for error, but because snubs seem baked into the identity of the documentary branch. For whoever may not make the cut this year, take heart: Albert Maysles is right there with you.