My Award Nominations: Documentary

Documentary filmmaking continues to thrive in the digital age, in which tools and broadcast platforms have never been more accessible to storytellers and audiences alike. I don't envy the doc branch of the Academy, who are forced to screen growing numbers of submissions every year. If, like me, you've only got time for a few, you could do a lot worse than these five:

One Category at a Time: Documentary

The documentary branch of the Academy sure does like its music docs. They've nominated four of 'em in as many years, and the overall voting membership doesn't seem to be tired of them; Two of the last three champs in this category presented stories about musical artists, and all signs point to this year's winner continuing the trend.

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.

My Award nominations: Documentary

As it is every year, I caught up with a lot of Documentaries after the Oscar nominations were announced, so these can also serve as capsule reviews for the ones I never had the time to write up properly.