The 166 Documentaries Competing for Oscar's Love

Yesterday AMPAS released the list of the documentaries that are eligible for this year's Oscar. The list is always crazy long (even longer than the other top 'specialty' prize -foreign language film). Members of the doc branch have 166 films to sift through from which they will draw a final 15 and then vote from those 15 for the 5 nominees. We wish the Foreign Film committee would do the same since it strikes us as odd that they only get 9 finalists. But we digress.

Because Glenn Dunks does such fine work for us here in his series Doc Corner, we've already written up 24 of these contenders. If the title is linked below it goes to our review. The complete list of eligible documentaries follows after the jump...

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Why does everyone want to talk about Chris Pine's penis?

Guest article from Anna from Defiant Success

Following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, film critics who had seen David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King were all abuzz on Twitter. The one scene they were very vocal about: star Chris Pine going full frontal. Following the social media explosion, Pine expressed his discomfort not at filming the scene but rather at how it was receiving more attention than the rest of the movie. (“There’s so much beheading in this. And yet people wanna talk about my penis.”) Subsequent interviews had Pine talking about how there’s a double standard in Hollywood towards performers going full frontal for their work; men receive a lot of press for whipping it out but when women bare it all for the camera, it’s barely noteworthy. In all honestly, Pine isn’t wrong in the slightest.

Mind you, there have been male frontal nudity scenes for decades -- at least for as long as the MPAA rating system has been in existence...

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Doc Corner: DOC NYC - Michael Moore's 'Fahrenheit 11/9'

DOC NYC is currently underway in New York and one of the great things is that alongside all the world, American, and New York premieres, the festival includes significant documentary titles from throughout the year. We’re using this opportunity to catch up with the latest from Michael Moore, Fahrenheit 11/9, which screened at the fest and is still in limited release across America.

Love him or loathe him – or probably more likely, sit somewhere in the middle of the two emotions – it’s hard to overstate Michael Moore’s importance to American documentary filmmaking. It’s not often that documentaries become pop culture touchstones and he has several that have become just that. The film that this new title is theoretically a sequel to will likely remain the highest grossing documentary of all time for the foreseeable future of cinema. It is interesting to note, however, that the two biggest zeitgeist-hitting political documentaries of the new century – that would be Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth – have floundered at the box office with much-belated sequels. Are audiences simply too bombarded by news that the thought of going to see a two-hour movie about the horrors of modern politics is just too much to bear?

Moore's decision to make a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 makes a lot of sense in theory, although watching the final product is a curious experience.

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EFA Nominations: Poland's "Cold War" Leads

by Nathaniel R

Joanna Kulig in "Cold War"

It was a big morning for Oscar hopefuls in the foreign language film category as a handful of them have been nominated for multiple European Film Awards. Pawel Pawlikowski, whose nun drama Ida won the Oscar a handful of years back, is leading the EFA field with his new music-filled drama Cold War, about a musician and singer in a long tragic love affair across Europe. It's nominated in 5 categories. The nearest rivals with 4 nominations each are Italy's Dogman, Sweden's Border, and Italy's Happy as Lazzaro (the only one not submitted for the Oscars). Two other Oscar submissions also had cause to celebrate: Denmark's police thriller The Guilty and Belgium's trans ballerina drama Girl were also nominated for a few awards. 

The complete list of nominations and a few more comments are after the jump...

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Would you rather?

Time for another round of our Instagram-blessed silly celebrity gawking game. For some reason it's a mostly manly lineup this morning. We'll get back to the actresses soon enough. They are never far from our hearts and minds and eyeballs.

Would you rather
... do morning beauty treatments with Laura Linney and Tony-nominee Ashley Park?
...accompany Tom Holland and pup to the vet?
...gamble it away with Bianca del Rio?
... reminisce about Elektra with Jason Isaacs?
... visit Thailand with Dan Stevens?
...seek career advice from Karl Urban?
...feel the hope with Patrick Stewart?
...convalesce with Nico Tortorella? (poor baby!)
... chill with Orlando Bloom and lots of teddy bears?
... or read with Nicole Kidman and Liane Moriarty?

Photos are after the jump to help you decide...

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