Oscar Volley: Who will triumph in Best Documentary?

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Baby Clyde, Glenn Dunks, and Nick Taylor to discuss Best Documentary Feature.

Baby Clyde: Every December (Or more likely January) when I’m putting together my year end ‘Best of’ list, it’s always filled with docs and International Features. In recent years I’ve found them vastly more interesting than the prestige pics that get churned out by Hollywood and inevitably nominated for Best Picture (I’ll be coming to that soon). 2021 was no exception. Half of my Top 10 is made up of documentaries. Three of which have made it into this category.

The big, splashy, hit of the year Summer of Soul, cleared its biggest hurdle by making the list in the first place. (The sometimes snobby Doc branch is notorious for snubbing the crowd pleasers -- Remember the Won’t You Be My Neighbour? debacle).  Whilst I’m mostly delighted by the quality of the nominees it does leave me with a quandary... 

Whilst Summer of Soul is my favourite of the bunch I do fear that its inclusion and clear front runner status, means that the fabulous Flee is about to go hand empty handed despite its history making 3 nominations. Can it spring a surprise? I’d kinda love it to.

Nick: What's the third doc in this lineup that's also in your top ten! Up until Summer of Soul got the BAFTA nomination for Best Editing, I also wondered if it would be the latest Doc contender to be left out for the crime of being too popular, or for being “approachable” in some key way that a mosaic on labor conditions in contemporary China or a retelling of the 1971 Attica riot told primarily by the prisoners themselves just isn't. Would The Rescue count as the “crowdpleaser” doc that missed? If so, the curse did good this year. Maybe the category’s fondness for docs about musicians (I’m thinking of Amy and 20 Feet From Stardom) should’ve assured us about Summer of Soul, or are those examples not recent enough to have been predictive? 

As for Flee, I honestly wonder if Animated Feature might be its best shot: The 2-D animation and poignant, politically resonant subject matter stands out mightily against a group of CGI kids flicks. Or maybe that’ll go against it! Either way, I think its historical nomination count will guarantee it something, though perhaps not in this category.

I would love to hear what Glenn has to say about Flee and Summer of Soul, both of which still feel neck and neck for winning this Oscar, and ranked quite high on his always-invaluable countdown of the year’s 25 best documentaries. I’m also very curious what we have to say about the other three nominees, which are absolutely not the three I saw predicted by anyone as rounding out this lineup. For my money, I think Ascension’s formal daring and quiet, studiously-observed provocations absolutely make it the class of the category, and I barely had any hope it would make it over the likes of Procession. How about y’all? Who are you rooting for? And can anyone find Writing With Fire?

Glenn: Firstly, I remember no debacle about Won't You Be My Neighbour? (if you catch my drift). Secondly, I think if Flee is going to surprise anywhere with an actual win then, yes, it probably is here. It is an interesting race this year. Yes, Summer of Soul feels like the frontrunner, but with negligible box office for all the contenders and without the usual big hitting streaming platforms (Soul is Hulu, not usually one to find Oscar successes), it feels comparatively wide open when put side by side with every other feature category. One has to imagine voters are checking out Flee given its nominated in three (!!!) categories, but Ascension (my personal pick for the best of this category) and Attica have had strong and prominent campaigns based purely anecdotally upon my own inbox that is full of invitations to events, galas and screenings. Only Writing with Fire, a surprise addition to the roster of nominees I feel confident in adding, won't win. But it is a worthy nominee, albeit not one I would have chosen, and well done to the team there on becoming the first Indian documentary ever nominated.

As noted, there are no Netflix titles nominated this year. Their big play, Robert Greene's exceptional Procession (my no. 1 doc of 2021), was unfortunately left off. This is only the second time in a decade this has happened (the other being 2018—the only time in the four most recent ceremonies that the streaming service didn't also outright win the Best Documentary Feature oscar). Nick, where do you see this category going with a group of films largely absent of our usual markers for documentary success?

Baby Clyde: The third nominated Doc to make my year end is the aforementioned and elusive Writing With Fire, a film that I turned down the opportunity to see midway through 2021 then couldn’t for the life of me find once it made the shortlist. Luckily my good friend Ronaldo Sosa is a veritable truffle hunter when it comes to tracking down difficult to find Oscar contenders. He somehow came up with a ridiculously obscure yet entirely legal way for me to see it before nomination morning, which I why I successfully predicted its making the five. The thing I love most about great docs is when they transport you into a world far removed from your own and introduce you to characters you would never usually encounter. Preferably they should be uplifting in some way. We’re living in dark times so tales of courage and people making the world a better place, whilst I lay in bed watching old films from the 30’s, always inspire me. Not to actually get out of bed or stop watching films from the 30’s but at least to make me think the entire world isn’t a total lost cause.  Writing With Fire ticks all these boxes. The fearless female journalists, slyly taking on the establishment that underestimates them, are bold brave and completely life affirming. Forget Spider-man these are 2021’s real superheroes.

You’re winning me round to the Flee triumphing argument. Still don’t think it will beat out Summer of Soul (the film that made me smile more than any other all year) but Animated Feature feels like a real possibility. With the "Bruno" viral moment and Lin looking more and more likely to complete his EGOT it just felt like Encanto was surging at the right time. But fingers crossed I’m wrong. I just fear that Flee's three noms may mean the votes are spread too thin (Am I mad for thinking Drive My Car isn’t a slam dunk?).

The last two I was less keen on. Ascension is part fascinating, part tedium. It would have made a wonderful short but past the sex dolls and water parks I found myself longing for it to be over (I also found myself longing to visit a Chinese water park).

Which leaves Attica a somewhat surprising inclusion for me. I enjoyed it well enough and certainly learnt a lot about a subject matter I only had a cursory knowledge of before, but whilst it had all the footage and all the interviews it needed left me somewhat cold. My choices would have been President, for all the same reasons as Writing With Fire and the biggest snub of all The Rescue which indeed feels like the type of great big crowd pleaser that the Doc branch can be snobby about. But no one was actually predicting its exclusion, were they???

NICK: Of the shortlisted films I saw, I think this is probably the best lineup we could’ve gotten. I didn’t love Procession as much as Greene’s two previous films, but I want someone as innovative and thoughtful as him to be an Oscar nominee. I had the hardest time finding President anywhere to rent until after the nominations were announced, but I’m excited to finally get my hands on it, and to eventually see Writing with Fire.

Baby Clyde, I completely agree with you on Attica. It’s a good, sometimes rousing documentary, and I appreciated the on-the-ground detailing of life as an inmate in Attica before the riot and the shifting temperatures of how prisoners, hostages, bystanders, and law enforcement were handling the negotiations. But I don’t think its basic proficiency as a film helped illuminate anything I was learning from the talking heads, and the intense level of contextualization it provided often felt like I was experiencing a full-on retelling of this story more than a piece of cinema with some formal shaping behind it. Cinda Firestone’s 1974 Attica documentary covers the riot itself, the inciting treatment of the prisoners, and the years-long, hideous ramifications from the prison and the state against the inmates in bold, cinematic strokes, and at a crisp 80 minutes. It’s sitting on YouTube right now, happily waiting for anyone who wants to find it and engage with it.

To Glenn’s point, I still think this race is between Flee and Summer of Soul. Theoretically one of the other nominees could swipe it at the last minute, but Flee and Soul's status as the frontrunners for so much of the season makes it hard for me to believe a third option could sneak past them. I’m not even sure which of the other three has the best chance to do it. Right now I’m predicting Flee, but ask me again in a few minutes. They’ve both made such strong cases for themselves as necessary historical documents and utterly human stories, and with different elements of formal brio to latch onto. I can see why they’ve made the impact they have, even if I’m not as dazzled as others are.

To look at the shortlist from a different angle, are there any films y’all think should’ve made it further? Am I silly to think the other three nominees couldn’t Icarus their way to a surprise victory?

Glenn: Oh, see Attica makes total sense to me. The subject matter is very much in their wheelhouse and its director, Stanley Nelson, is a very popular filmmaker within the industry. Whereas The Rescue's copious use of recreations probably didn't bode well for a nomination (I certainly wasn't predicting it having seen all from the shortlist). My own top documentaries of 2021 list shows where my mind was at—albeit several those were not eligible for whatever reason. Which is a real shame no matter which way you cut it. The documentary branch have proven themselves capable of pulling really interesting choices out, even amid the more traditional fare, like they did with this year's Ascension. I do think titles like Bulletproof, Little Girl and North by Current, which weren't on the longlist or submitted at all, will only grow in estimation among critics in the coming years. Of the long-list titles, Todd Haynes; The Velvet Underground and Camilla Nielsson's President are ones I would have liked to have seen nominated. Having said all that, I'm just thankful we're getting the category presented on TV!

All up, though, I think this is a strong line-up. Certainly several notches above last year's that ultimately gave us a win for something as silly as The Octopus Teacher. No matter which title wins (one of the frontrunners or not), it'll be somewhere from solid to excellent. Ultimately, despite all the can-it-or-can't-it about Flee, I'm going to say it cannot and will be ticking Questlove's Summer of Soul on my predictions.

Nick: You’ve just listed several films I either love or am desperately excited to track down. I for one would love for more people to watch the non-shortlisted No Ordinary Man and Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, both of which focus on queer American men with very fascinating artistic and political legacies. The Afghani doc What We Left Unfinished, about the turbulent history of the country’s state-sponsored film industry from 1978-1992 as different regimes warred for power, told through the production histories of five never-completed films, is another personal favorite. 

But as you say Glenn, I’m just fucking happy this award is being handed out live on the broadcast, even if the show itself sounds more unbearable with every announcement. God willing it’ll stay on the broadcast, too. The fact that we’re guaranteed not to have a winner as bad as last year’s is another bright spot. Conversely, none of these nominees pulling it out would bring me the same joy that Time winning would have, but that’s a very high bar to hold against most films. The winner will be good, the lineup itself is strong while seemingly not being the exact five anyone wanted. Hard to complain too much, and ultimately very easy to talk about what a great year this was for documentary film.

Comments

[Peggy Sue]

The last 10-15 minutes of Attica are brutal. Chills down my spine.

[Pam]

Having seen all, I really liked FLEE, but honestly, given the state of the things in the world, I'm quoting Baby Clyde,

"Still don’t think it will beat out Summer of Soul (the film that made me smile more than any other all year)".

It WAS my favorite film of the year.

[Donny Donny]

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