You seen any of the Oscar-Nominated Documentaries?

No?

Me either. And I watched a LOT of docs this year. But what is out there and available to be seen never or at least rarely correlates with the Academy’s docs branch.

An occasional exception proves the rule, but these folks are in a bubble all their own. All five docs this year are from overseas, which is not an issue in and of itself. The documentary boom that cheap cameras (even cell phones) and the rise of video podcasts and streaming platforms to show them has heralded wasn’t limited to North America.

But there were docs with genuine pop appeal this year, moving and well-made films with a domestic and international audience.

Instead, here are the nominees.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM

“Bobi Wine: The People’s President”

“The Eternal Memory”

“Four Daughters”

“To Kill a Tiger”

“20 Days in Mariupol”

A couple of them I’ve heard of. But none of the 100+ docs that I reviewed — all of them with distribution — made this list.

From “The Hollywood Reporter.”

No Oscar category was more surprising this year than best documentary feature. The two films that most experts believed would stand the best shot of winning, if nominated by the documentary branch and offered up to the full Academy, were Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony and Davis Guggenheim’s Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, and neither made the final five. This sort of thing has happened so many times in recent years — with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?JaneLife ItselfThree Identical StrangersApollo 11 and others — that it really needs to be addressed.

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About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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