Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

From what I’ve been able to gather, the biggest surprise emanating from Tuesday’s announcement of Oscar nominees was the scarcity of surprises, or “snubs,” as those of us in the media prefer to describe such anomalies. The films that made the final cut for Best Picture all seemed worthy enough, while the acting categories were filled with men and women whose performances were inarguably excellent.

It would have been nice to hear the names, Vera Farmiga, Q'Orianka Kilcher or Joan Allen, announced as nominees for Best Actress in a Lead Role -- at the expense of perennial candidate Judi Dench, perhaps – but their absence hardly qualifies as a snub. The same holds for Tommy Lee Jones, as either Best Actor or Best Director, Viggo Mortensen, or the star of Keane, Damian Lewis.

It’s safe to describe the lack of a nomination for Star Wars: Episode 3, for its visual effects and/or sound editing, as a snub. Still, it’s difficult to feel too sorry for George Lucas after he copped those highly prized People’s Choice and Teen Choice awards. Like everyone else who missed the cut in 2006, he probably has better things to do on Academy Awards night, anyway.

And, taking nothing away from Terrence Howard’s justifiably nominated performance in Hustle & Flow, it borders on the bizarre that the film’s signature song -- "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" -- was one of only three nominees for Best Original Song. My guess is that the voters were anxious to see how ABC censors would deal with such lyrics as, “Will have a whole lot of bitches talkin’ shit …,” “It's fucked up where I live, but that's just how it is …” and “Niggaz hatin’ on me cause I got hoes on the tray.” That, or they were hoping to rectify the grave injustice done to Curtis Mayfield, whose truly great compositions for Superfly were ignored.

Anyone looking for unpardonable slights would do well to stick to the category where they’re most likely to occur - year after bloody year - that of Best Documentary Feature.

The Great Snub of 2006 is – the envelope, please -- the elimination of Werner Herzog’s fascinating Grizzly Man, which used the victims’ own tapes to document the events leading up to the horrific deaths of Xtreme naturalists Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard. That the critically lauded film didn’t even make the documentary committee’s short list of 15 titles, announced more than two months ago, ranks right up there with last January’s inexplicable exclusion of Paul Giamatti from the list of nominees for Sideways.

It is, however, not without precedent. Even after being forcibly reformed in the mid-’90s, in the wake of the Hoop Dreams dust-up, the highly secretive committee continued to make waves beyond the confines of its darkened screening room. More capricious, even, than those who set the eligibility standards for foreign-language entries, executives of the documentary branch are famous for changing rules in mid-competition and refusing to reveal how many members were on hand to vote on the candidates.

For John Anderson’s article on the snubbing of Grizzly Man, in Sunday’s New York Times Arts & Leisure, an Academy flack refused once again to comment on the committee’s Byzantine methodology. Nothing personal, but “no comment” has been the standard response from the Academy’s crack p.r. team to nearly any question considered to be any more taxing than what Wolfgang Puck is cooking up for the Governor’s Ball. It would be easier to find a copy George W. Bush’s attendance records while in the Air National Guard.

I wondered how the committee felt about the decision to eliminate the more anthropomorphic French vocal track from March of the Penguins, which was used in Europe, and replace it with Morgan Freeman’s soothing narrative. I also considered asking how it felt about the day-and-date release of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in theaters and on HDNet. Waiting around all day for a “no comment” isn’t my idea of a good time or cost-effective reporting, however … God bless the blogosphere.

Typically, this bit of boilerplate, found on official AMPAS press releases, is all one is going to get: “Eligible documentaries were screened by the Documentary Branch Screening Committee, made up of members of the branch who serve on a volunteer basis. The above films were chosen after a preliminary round of screenings.”

It’s a joke. But, it’s the Academy’s joke, and the punchline begins with an “F” and ends with a “Y-O-U.” They’re in charge, and you’re not … and don’t forget to wear a tuxedo to the awards ceremony.

That said, however, the committee’s task does seem to get more formidable with each succeeding year, and a more sensible method of selecting nominees ought to be found. This year’s original list of eligible candidates was comprised of 85 films, many of which likely necessitated a bit more attention than a few minutes of perusal, before being given the Gong Show treatment … as was once the case, and still may be.

Simply put, today’s documentaries are more entertaining, enlightening and overtly provocative than they ever were, and competition has stiffened considerably. Traditional guidelines have been trampled, mostly in the wake of Michael Moore’s box-office successes, although some in the academy have been reluctant to ratify the changes in methodology.

The introduction of lightweight video and digital cameras, over the last 30 years, has opened the floodgates to tens of thousands of wannabe documentarians, who, given the right context and timing, could stumble onto an award-worthy subject. The immense popularity of “reality-TV’ – alongside the proliferation of non-fictive programming on cable television and PBS -- has likewise precipitated an interest in documentaries beyond the classroom, festival and arthouse scene.

Numbers don’t lie. This year, March of the Penguins – which was made in a highly professional manner -- caused a sensation by grossing more than $77 million at the domestic box-office. Last year, Fahrenheit 9/11 topped $120 million; Super Size Me, $11.5; Riding Giants, $2.3 million; The Story of the Weeping Camel, $4 million; Touching the Void, $10.1 million; Tupac: Resurrection, $7.7 million; and Oscar-winner, Born Into Brothels, $3.4 million. In the large-format category, the standard has been set by Everest, which has drawn $125 million in international sales, while the more recent NASCAR: The IMAX Experience, is at $22.2 million, and growing.

Nearly a dozen years ago, the un-nominated Hoop Dreams smashed all existing records by topping out at nearly $8 million. It’s since done extremely well in VHS and DVD, and last year got the Criterion Collection treatment, to boot.

Aspiring documentarians would do better if they minimized their expectations, though, and continued to dream of returns in the six-figure range and a broadcast window on PBS or cable. The vast majority of docs and indies are fortunate to find distribution, at all, and returns in the mid-five figures.

Rarer still are such crossover phenoms as Dogtown and Z-Boys, which grossed $1.2 million at the box-office, before taking off in the ancillary market. The intense buzz inspired a theatrical re-make budgeted at $25 million, and a marketing campaign exponentially larger than the cost of the original doc.

Lords of Dogtown bombed. Most potential viewers apparently felt as if they’d already seen the movie. Spike Lee’s plans for adapting Hoop Dreams never materialized.

Clearly, much more is now at stake at Oscar time than prestige and niche sales to institutional clients. The documentary committee is well aware of this fact, and no longer arbitrarily vetoes films audacious enough to make money (one of the perceived rubs against Hoop Dreams).

Having already seen all five of the nominated films in the Documentary Feature category, I feel comfortable saying that each is more interesting, entertaining and provocative than 90 percent of the theatrical features I sat through last year. Indeed, even minus Grizzly Man, it may be the most representative group of candidates in Oscar history. All things being equal, Darwin’s Nightmare, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Murderball and“Street Fight could have presented a reasonable challenge to prohibitive-favorite March of the Penguins, at the podium, if not the box-office.

The short list also contained the titles, After Innocence, The Boys of Baraka, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Favela Rising, Mad Hot Ballroom ($8.4 million), Occupation: Dreamland, On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report, Rize ($3.2 million), 39 Pounds of Love and Unknown White Male. It could just as easily have added Reel Paradise, The Protocols of Zion, Why We Fight, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt without diluting the quality of the selections. (Last year, the short list went out without Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and Control Room, both winners on various critics’ lists.)

Of the finalists, Enron, Murderball and Penguins already have enjoyed a multi-city launch, grossing $4 million, $1.5 million and $77 million respectively. At their most prolific, Enron was exhibited on 97 screens simultaneously; Murderball, on 130; and Penguins, on a whopping 2,500. Grizzly Man returned $3.1 million, topping out on 105 screens.

Outside of screenings on the festival circuit and in brief qualifying runs, Darwin’s Nightmare and Street Fight have yet to enjoy a theatrical release. Both are terrific.

Hubert Sauper’s harrowing environmental exposition, Darwin’s Nightmare, describes how the seemingly benign introduction of predatory Nile perch into Lake Victoria, a half-century ago, has evolved into both an ecological disaster and thriving export business that brings tens of millions of dollars into Tanzania every year. Some of the fish-export money actually does find its way into the hands of an otherwise impoverished citizenry, but most goes into the coffers of industrialists, politicians and militias, which benefit from return flights loaded with weapons. It’s as good a thriller as Syriana, which employed oil as the commodity of choice.

Marshall Curry’s freshman effort, Street Fight, reminds viewers that it’s still business-as-usual for machine politicians in cities, such as Newark, N.J., where they’re free to operate far from the view of big-city media outlets. Curry’s original intention was merely to capture the excitement of mayoral campaign that could have put a legitimate reformer, Cory Booker, in City Hall. What he discovered, instead, was a veritable police state, where his access to incumbent Mayor Sharpe James was capriciously denied and “volunteer” campaign workers from a neighboring state were recruited to work the streets. Somewhere, in the Great Beyond, Richard J. Daley, Tom Pendergast, Huey P. Long and Boss Tweed followed the 2002 election with rapt attention, cheering James’ every infringement of 1st Amendment Rights … so will audiences.

Of the shortlisted docs that I’ve seen, Favela Rising is easily recommendable as a companion piece to City of God and Black Orpheus, in that it’s set in the same slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and uses music as a force for community building. Likewise, Rize documents a movement – this one in L.A. – that uses competitive dance, music and elaborate costumes to create a dialogue between rival inner-city forces. Unknown White Male follows a personable and accomplished amnesia victim along a pothole-filled road, if not to recovery, exactly, then to inner peace and the ability to cope with his new self. The film asks questions that anyone with a healthy interest in existentialism would find well worth pondering.

In addition to the documentary listings in Netflix, Facets and Amazon, fans of non-fictive filmmaking can find out about other worthwhile titles at the websites of HBO/Cinemax Documentary Films, ThinkFilm, Docurama, Palm Pictures and the International Documentary Association. In the meantime, don’t bet against March of the Penguins.

February 2 , 2006
- Gary Dretzka

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