The embers of the Academy are voting now (ballots are due no later than Tuesday, February 19th) and this year’s ballot is a little different from those of recent years, thanks mainly to changes in the rules regarding Best Documentary Feature (and Short). When these changes were announced, early last year, I spoke with Michael Moore about them. He’s on the Board of Governors of the Academy’s documentary branch; he was an advocate of these changes, and he explained them to me. There are two main ones—first, opening the voting to all members of the Academy (who, however, must affirm that they’ve seen all five nominated films); and, second, the requirement that all nominated films receive a review from the New York Times at the time of their theatrical release. Here’s how Moore described the new regulations to me:
The second big change—the requirement of a Times review as a criterion of eligibility for nomination—is the one that seemed odder to me. I asked Moore about it, and he explained that it was intended to reserve the nominations for films that had regular theatrical releases, rather than ones made for TV that were quietly shown in out-of-the-way theatres specifically to avoid review. Here’s what he said:
I asked: “They didn’t want one? They literally…the whole point was to avoid review?”
Specifically, Moore cited “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” a documentary which was one of the five finalists for Best Documentary Film in 2011. He praised the film itself, but added:
And not just documentaries. When I spoke with Moore, I cited a 2011 feature film, “Cinema Verite,” that will never be considered a feature film; it was made for HBO, broadcast on HBO, never received a U.S. theatrical release—but really should have, because several of its performances, and, for that matter, its script, were Oscar-worthy. It’s a movie, but it didn’t achieve the recognition it deserved as a movie because of its television release. (It’s available on DVD.)
Of course, it’s not the Academy’s job to right the wrongs and straighten the tangles of distribution; it takes account of what’s distributed (and, of course, distributors and producers play by the rules for Oscar consideration). But there’s at least one more conundrum of the nominating process that the Academy does have the power to solve: the essential indecency of granting official bureaucratic, often quasi-governmental, film commissions from each country the power to nominate that country’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film. Many repressive countries simply eliminate from consideration the works of its free-thinking directors (Jafar Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film,” from Iran, ought to have been a nominee, but Iran—after first choosing another film—decided to boycott the Oscars this year, thereby putting the movie out of contention), and democratic countries often support more commercial works over worthier ones (France nominated “Untouchables” rather than “Holy Motors”). The Academy needs to find a way to make up its own foreign-film branch—and, in the process, its own mind.
Photograph by Mehdi Taamallah/AFP/Getty.