The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films.
[edit] Winners and nominees
Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year (that is, the year they were released under the Academy's rules for eligibility). In practice, due to the limited nature of documentary distribution, a film may be released in different years in different venues, sometimes years after production is complete.
In 1942, there was one Documentary category and four winners.
From 1943 there were two separate documentary categories (features and short films)
2000: Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport – Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer
2001: Murder on a Sunday Morning (Un coupable idéal) – Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet
2002: Bowling for Columbine – Michael Donovan and Michael Moore
2003: The Fog of War – Errol Morris and Michael Williams
2004: Born into Brothels – Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
2005: March of the Penguins (La marche de l'empereur) – Luc Jacquet
2006: An Inconvenient Truth – Davis Guggenheim
2007: Taxi to the Dark Side – Alex Gibney and Eva Orner
2008: Man on Wire – Simon Chinn and James Marsh
2009:
[edit] Controversies
The Award for Documentary Feature is arguably[citation needed] the most controversial of the Academy Awards. Many critically acclaimed documentaries are not nominated. Examples include The Thin Blue Line, Roger & Me, Hoop Dreams, and Fahrenheit 9/11 (see below). The controversy over Hoop Dreams was enough to force the Academy Awards to change their documentary voting system.[1]
Whether the new rules are successful is still debated[citation needed], since 2005's Grizzly Man, a documentary strong enough to appear on many critics' top 10 lists[2] was not nominated, and did not even make the Academy's internally distributed top 15 list. Grizzly Man's exclusion was later revealed to be the result of an Academy rule disqualifying documentary films that are constructed entirely out of archive footage. However, Grizzly Man included new interviews and other footage shot exclusively for the film.
There is debate[citation needed] over the role television distribution should play in the selection process. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, at the time the highest grossing documentary film ever made, was ineligible because Moore had opted to have it played on television prior to the 2004 Election. Conversely, the 1982 winner Just Another Missing Kid, directed by John Zaritsky, was created by editing together footage he originally shot for the Canadian investigative journalism TV show The Fifth Estate.
[edit] References
