My Award Nominations: Best Documentary

True confession: I don't get out to as many docs as I should. Oh sure, when a buzzy Oscar frontrunner is playing somewhere I'll seek it out, but I always fall into the habit of playing catch-up with the year's other worthy titles (especially the Oscar nominees) in January and February.

Of course, access to those titles is seldom easy. Some of them come and go so fast you have to wait for months until they show up on some online platform. Wim Wenders' The Salt of the Earth won't even get a limited theatrical run until the end of March. (Hey, Sony Pictures Classics/Mongrel Media: If you want my money, release your Oscar-nominated movie BEFORE the Oscars! #BadForBusiness)

Since my viewing queue of 2014 non-fic pics has peaked at eight, I've made this post a one-stop shop for my capsule reactions to all of them, starting off with the five that I myself would nominate for my own Best Documentary distinction:

WGA Corroborates Pundits' Favs for Writing Oscars

The Writers Guild of America may not be the most reliable Oscar bellwether due to the their annual heap of ineligible screenplays, but when their winners coincide with the perceived frontrunners anyway, it still reassures any doubtful pundits.

This year, my predictions for both writing Oscars were mirrored by the WGA; Graham Moore's script for The Imitations Game in adapted and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel in original (more on that race on Monday).

The documentary field, for a refreshing change of pace, went to something other than CitizenFour, which wasn't nominated. Instead, it went to Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy. I actually caught up with this doc just the other day, and quite liked it. It's often hard to assess how well a non-fiction film is "written", but I tend to think about how well it illuminates or explains its subject matter. That's one arena where Knappenberger's extensive, comprehensive study of free info on the Internet clearly has Laura Poitras' film beat.