One Category at a Time: Documentary

Last year's decision to send out screeners of the nominated docs and allow the entire Academy to vote on them made it a pretty easy category to predict. The dominance of Searching for Sugar Man with the guilds was further bolstered by the fact that it was clearly the nominee with the widest appeal, and would obviously do better with a larger voting pool. This year's race, however, is more up in the air. No one documentary has dominated industry precursors, and the presumed popular favourite might suffer from similarities to last year's winner.