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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
The Quirks of the Best Documentary Category
Cutting Through Rocks Best documentary has become the toughest Oscar category to predict in recent years, especially when it comes to nominations. The documentary branch has become famously quirky in recent years, passing over such populist, acclaimed, and decorated titles as Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, American Symphony, and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. Past performance is no guarantee of success—I’ve even heard rumors that some voters will refuse on principle to nominate a film by a previous Oscar winner—and geography is not destiny. Even as the best international feature category has skewed more European in recent years, the documentary branch has gotten more global than ever. Every nominated film in 2023 and 2024 was set outside the U.S., and only two were shot in Europe (both dealt with the war in Ukraine).
There have been calls for the documentary branch to follow their international counterparts and allow Academy members from all disciplines to help choose the 15 shortlisted titles. My hot take? Let’s leave the doc branch alone and let it do its thing. Are the members snobby? Maybe, but it’s their right to be under the current Academy rules. And besides, when we have features like Melania making headlines for “the best opening for a documentary film,” I think it’s a good thing that the members of the doc branch take their work—and the work of their professional peers—very seriously.
The biggest surprise this year is the absence of My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow, Julia Loktev’s very serious and epic (at 324 minutes) portrait of independent journalists in Russia doing their jobs and attempting to live normal lives while facing increasing government scrutiny and harassment. The film won the Gotham Award for best documentary feature in December, then took top honors from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics, setting it up to be a major Oscar contender. But the doc branch chose not to follow suit. I can point to the controversial win for the five-part OJ: Made in America in 2017, which many saw more as a docu-series than a feature. Perhaps the large scale and multi-part rollout of My Undesirable Friends worked against it.
Or maybe the documentary branch took a look around and decided that matters closer to AMPAS’s home demanded more attention and scrutiny. Of this year’s finalists, three—HBO’s The Alabama Solution, Apple’s Come See Me in the Good Light, and Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor—are set here in the U.S. Rounding out the field are Cutting Through Rocks, a study of local politics in Iran that does not yet have U.S. distribution, and Kino Lorber’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which documents life inside Russia at the outset of the Ukraine war.
The Perfect Neighbor has the strongest edge among this year’s nominees, especially given the big numbers Geeta Gandbhir’s film pulled when it landed on Netflix. After its premiere at Sundance last year, the film won the festival’s U.S. documentary directing award; it also earned a PGA nom for best documentary, proving its appeal to members among the producers branch. It’s also one of the more inventive contenders this year: Composed entirely of police body-cam footage, the film is a maddening examination of Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws and anti-Black sentiment cooked into the U.S. justice system. It’s also a difficult film to watch as tragedy unfolds on camera and in real time, which could turn off voters who are seeking solutions to societal ills rather than mere proof of them.
Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s The Alabama Solution, which also premiered at Sundance and earned a PGA nom this year, is another difficult-to-watch portrait of corruption and abuse within the prison walls of the Easterling Correctional Facility. Much of Jarecki and Kaufman’s film was surreptitiously shot by its subjects within the prison walls—who essentially pitched the film to its directors when they were onsite to film a religious revival meeting at the facility.
The Alabama Solution and The Perfect Neighbor feel like the top contenders, and their similarities—in subject matter, but also filming process—make it difficult to give one the edge over the other. Both Jarecki and Gandhbir are notable documentarians who have won several accolades across their careers. Jarecki earned his first Oscar nom in 2004 for Capturing the Friedmans and a 2015 Emmy for The Jinx; Gandbhir is a five-time Emmy winner (including two Primetime awards for editing When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and By the People: The Election of Barack Obama), and she is a double-nominee this year, having also earned a nod for her documentary short The Devil Is Busy. Appearing twice on the Oscar ballot can’t hurt her chances of winning at least one of those prizes.
But don’t discount the other nominees, either. Ryan White, whose crowdpleaser Good Night, Oppy was notably snubbed in 2023, earned his first Oscar nom for Come See Me in the Good Light. Another Sundance alum (where it won last year’s festival favorite award), White’s film follows the American poet and activist Andrea Gibson as they look back on their life and career while battling ovarian cancer. The film is not exactly cheery, but White’s portrait of Gibson and their partner Megan Falley is a touching examination of love and hope amid trauma and pain. The film is best described with the title of the song that Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile wrote for the doc: “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet.” Those are precisely the emotions that tug on voters’ heartstrings.
The two international offerings in the mix follow trends set by the Academy’s tastes. Mohammadreza Eyni and Sara Khaki’s debut feature, Cutting Through Rocks, yet another 2025 Sundance premiere, depicts Sara Shahverdi as she becomes the first Iranian woman to be elected to the council of her rural village and faces backlash as she shakes up cultural norms in her community—themes examined in the Iranian-set It Was Just an Accident (a nominee this year for best international feature) and The Seed of the Sacred Fig (an international nominee last year).
David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which examines government propaganda in Russian schools after the invasion of Ukraine, follows 2024 nominee Porcelain War, 2023 winner 20 Days in Mariupol, and 2022 winner Navalny in the Academy’s streak of nominating (and sometimes rewarding) anti-Russian docs. Navalny scored an upset win over Fire of Love, which had swept nearly all of the precursor awards that year, suggesting that a recognizable name in a film’s title can help attract attention. If Mr. Nobody pulls off a similar surprise, one might imagine that the “Against Putin” part of the title did some work on its behalf.
