93rd Academy Awards: Doc, Doc, who's there? A deep dive into the feature nominees

by Josh Bierman

I’m sure I’m not the only contributor/reader on this site who upon Oscar nomination morning wakes to find they’ve already seen just about every above the line nominee. Or if they haven’t, they come to terms with having to sit through Hillbilly Elegy after managing to avoid it for months. 

This season, like in so many past ones, it’s those below the line nominees that I spent time getting to know after the nomination announcement. I didn't expect to be so far behind on Best Documentary Feature ahead of nomination morning...

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Barack Obama's Top 10 Lists

Okay top 14 and top 10. President Barack Obama, who has gifted us with his favourites lists in previous years and revealed the taste (no surprise), and is now involved in the movies as a producer has released his favourites list for this accursed year, writing:

Obama visiting with a "Crip Camp" activist

Like everyone else, we were stuck inside a lot this year, and with streaming further blurring the lines between theatrical movies and television features, I’ve expanded the list to include visual storytelling that I’ve enjoyed this year, regardless of format.

His top 10 (sorry, 14) movies and top 10 tv shows after the jump...

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Critics Choice Documentary Awards 2020

It's the fifth year since the Critics Choice Awards spun off their documentary honors until a whole sidebar awards. I personally abstain from these as I don't see enough documentaries. Our doc corner guru Glenn Dunks would be an ideal voter, though. If he wrote about these winning films, there's a link. The big winners were Dick Johnson is Dead with the two top wins and an additional honor and My Octopus Teacher with two wins as well. The full list of wins is after the jump...

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Doc Corner: Is 'Crip Camp' an early Oscar frontrunner?

By Glenn Dunks

As if on cue to allow isolated audiences one hell of an emotional purge, James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham’s sublime Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution is here. Seemingly built to make audiences burst into tears out of honest to goodness heart-melting positivity and righteous activist anger in equal measure (a delicate balance to say the least), it is perhaps for the first time since this pandemic began that I contemplated my own small place in this big world outside of COVID-19.

It’s big-hearted and impassioned; an unsurprising winner of Sundance’s audience award and an obvious frontrunner for the Academy Award.

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