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Considerations
Covering the annual film industry awards races, with sharp commentary on the pictures, the players, the money and the spectacle. by Tyler Coates
Will & Harper and the Netflix Effect
Harper Steele and Will Ferrell in Will & Harper Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here.
At this year’s 35th annual Producers Guild Awards (which took place on Feb. 25, two weeks before the March 3 Oscars), Netflix’s American Symphony took the prize for best documentary feature. The Matthew Heineman-directed film followed musician Jon Batiste’s meteoric year in which he won five Grammys (including album of the year) and premiered a new composition at Carnegie Hall—all while his wife, journalist and artist Suleika Jaouad, fought a rare form of leukemia.
One would have expected the film to win the respective Oscar for documentary feature two weeks later—the PGA Awards are often reliable predictors of the Oscars considering the big overlap between PGA and Academy members. But American Symphony, despite its critical acclaim and spot on the shortlist of 15 features presented to the doc branch’s voters for the Oscar nominations, failed to earn a spot among the five finalist. (20 Days in Mariupol eventually won the Oscar.)
American Symphony’s snub caught a few awards pundits off guard, as it—as well as another non-nominated title, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, directed by Oscar-winner Davis Guggenheim—were both considered by many prognosticators to be two of the category’s frontrunners. So incensed was my former colleague Scott Feinberg that he suggested, in his analysis of the Oscar nominations back in January, that the Academy should rethink the nomination process for documentary features:
Did the 680 doc branch members just assume that those films had enough votes from others in their ranks that they could afford to vote for other films? Were they resentful of those films’ popularity and/or backers (both hail from deep-pocketed streamers, Netflix and Apple TV+ respectively)? Did they fear that those films, if nominated, would beat a more purist doc? There’s no way to say for sure. But, as one previously Oscar-nominated filmmaker who had nothing to do with this year’s race wrote to me this morning, “It’s broken.”
In my humble opinion, it’s high time for the Academy to open up documentary feature Oscar nomination voting beyond the documentary branch, and to invite any Academy members who wish to opt in to vote to do so, just as they already do for the international feature and animated feature categories.
While all Academy members vote for the 10 features in the best picture category during the nomination process, the rest of the nominees are determined by their categories’ respective branches—directors vote to nominate directors, actors for actors, composers vote for the music categories, etc. Ten categories unveil preliminary shortlists ahead of the nomination voting period (this year’s shortlists will be announced Dec. 17); as Feinberg notes, all Academy members can opt in to select the preliminary international and animated feature nominees. It requires homework: those members must agree to watch a set number of features for consideration. The documentary feature category, on the other hand, is selected by members of the documentary branch who, I am told, are a particularly prickly bunch—or, if you’re more of an optimist, a group that prioritizes a certain prestige in both filmmaking and subject.
I’ve heard a lot of theories as to why American Symphony didn’t resonate with the doc branch. The first is Netflix. The streamer has won the Oscar in the category three times (for Icarus, American Factory and My Octopus Teacher), and is a behemoth with lots of money and a large documentary slate. More than one person has suggested there’s a general sourness among documentarians who have yet to get the big Netflix treatment. Another is that it was a music documentary; for every 20 Feet From Stardom and Amy, dozens of rock docs go unnoticed by the Academy, and strategists tell me those titles are always tough to promote. And finally, there’s the growing international voting bloc within the Academy; one insider suggested that non-American viewers were put off by Batiste following his career rather than forgoing continued success to stick by his wife’s side during her illness—therefore missing one of the doc’s points, the underlying struggle for an artist to prioritize creativity over all other pursuits.
Last season’s five documentary feature nominees, meanwhile, represented global cinema even more diversely than the international category: in the latter were four European submissions and one from Japan (which was directed by German auteur Wim Wenders). While a Ukrainian doc won the Oscar, the category also included films set in Chile, India, Tunisia and Uganda. As always, there are a lot of factors at play because the branch, like the Academy at large, represents a very big group of people with diverse and subjective tastes. The system isn’t “broken”—if anything, it’s functioning exactly how it was designed.
How does that impact this year’s contenders? If there’s one big contender that could follow in American Symphony’s path, it’s Netflix’s Will & Harper. Directed by Josh Greenbaum, the film follows best friends and former Saturday Night Live performer Will Ferrell and writer Harper Steele as they embark on a road trip across the United States—their first venture together after Steele came out as a transgender woman. The film is both a romp and a tearjerker; the friendship on display is both stupidly silly and deeply heartfelt. And as much as it delves into the experience of being trans in our currently polarized America, it also examines Ferrell’s starpower (and his own sense of it); one particularly memorable sequence finds the pair being nearly harassed out of a Texas steakhouse, proving that Ferrell’s celebrity charm only goes so far.
I loved this doc—the trailer had me crying weeks before I got to see it—but I wonder how it will land with the doc branch. Its possible weaknesses are obvious; SNL isn’t a cultural touchstone outside of the United States, and the film’s contrived segments are hardly vérité. And yet, when transgender identity is politically weaponized, the nasty intolerance Ferrell and Steele experience on their trip is shockingly blunt and eye-opening. Watching the film might be an entirely different experience post-election, even if it offers a sense of hope through humor and song.
But Netflix should be resting easy with two big contenders in Natalie Rae and Angela Patton’s Daughters—about a father-daughter dance for incarcerated men and their children—and Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, which depicts the unexamined life of a young gamer and the legacy he left behind online after his death. But don’t expect the popularity of R.J. Cutler’s Martha to translate to an Oscar nomination. The same goes for Warner Bros.’ Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story and Disney’s Music by John Williams; the celebrity bio-doc, no matter the subject or the director, seems to be déclassé in the eyes of the doc branch members.
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