Michael Moore on the Academy’s New Documentary Rules

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:

I would describe then as bringing the democracy movement to the documentary branch of the Academy. For far too long, the nominees had been selected by committees, and sometimes just one or two people could block a film from even being considered for the short list. And in a branch of a hundred and sixty members, it didn’t seem fair that two people could or should have the say over whether “Hoop Dreams,” “Shoah,” any of the Michael Apted “Up” series, or any Errol Morris film, before just a few years ago, when he finally won, finally got nominated.

Nothing by the Maysles brothers was ever nominated, nothing by Fred Wiseman—its equivalent in fiction film would be as if Spielberg, Scorsese, and Kubrick had never been nominated for an Oscar. It seems like you’d have some explaining to do. And every year, right, it’s the same story when they are announced—I mean, usually when they are announced, there is always like, “How come this actor wasn’t nominated” or, “How come this movie didn’t make it,” there is always a surprise or two. With our branch there’s like seven or eight surprises.

Every year, people just cannot understand how did this not get nominated, how did this not even make the short list? So I figured that the simplest and easiest way to prevent this from happening any further is to just let everyone vote. Let the whole branch vote. Just like the editors: every editor votes for the five editors, you know, every actor votes for the five acting nominees, directors, all the other branches, that’s the way they do it. I made the case that we should join the Academy and be like the other branches—have democracy and let everyone vote and be transparent about it and be inclusive—and to make it even more inclusive, because our filmmakers sometimes don’t have much money, that the Academy agree to send a copy of every eligible film to every member of the documentary branch, so that before we even make a short list we have access—and not just in December but all year long. So as soon as the movie is released, we’ll get a DVD of the movie. Starting next year, they’re going to stream, too, so you can watch it online.

And then, the second part of this is that after you have your five nominees, again, like all the other branches, everybody gets to vote for everybody. So every documentary member gets to vote for makeup. I don’t know how much documentary filmmakers know about makeup, but they get to vote for it. We get to vote for special effects, we get to vote for everything. They don’t get to vote for us. The only people that get to vote for us are the Academy members who show up in New York or L.A. on these three or four specific days. The nominations are announced, and we sit there over a couple of nights and watch all five films and then vote there.

What that meant was that the Oscar was being decided by sometimes as few as two hundred people. There are six thousand members in the branch, fifty-eight hundred, and I said to the people who are on the executive committee of the documentary branch and to the board of directors that when the presenter on the Oscar stage says the Academy has decided that the best documentary of the year is such-and-such, that’s not entirely the truth, is it? What she should be saying is: less than five per cent of the Academy has decided that this is the best documentary of the year. That has to stop. The executive committee of the documentary branch, which has about twenty-three members, agreed with me, and voted unanimously to make these changes, and took it to the board of governors, and they, on December 6th [2011], voted to approve the changes that the executive committee had voted unanimously for. So now, starting this coming year, we will be on par with the rest of the Academy. By the way, the short-film branch, I think, also decided—they voted the same decision, to open it up to everybody and make sure that everybody gets to vote and make works accessible. The Academy is going to do that for them, too; they are going to be the first ones to try out the streaming process. Every Academy member will be able to click here and watch it on their computer or their screen at home or whatever.

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:

This was our problem: we were getting documentaries that were qualifying each year, they were meeting the eligibility requirements, which was that you had to play for a week in New York and L.A. But they were sneaking films, hiding their week. In L.A., they would get an obscure theatre out in the Valley, here they would get a screening room in Harlem or a place up in Washington Heights. Some place where the Times wouldn’t know about it. The reason they were doing that was because they did not want a New York Times review.

I asked: “They didn’t want one? They literally…the whole point was to avoid review?”

Yeah, the reason why the review rule has to take place is not because we thought of it, it was because they were trying to avoid the review. Because they’re not a movie, they are a TV movie, and they want the review on the day that it is on TV.

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:

This was a film that was not theatrically released—and everybody in the Academy knows this—it was a film that met the letter of the law but definitely not the spirit, and so we decided, there is a very simple solution to this: if it’s the review that they are trying to avoid, let’s make the review one of the benchmarks, one of the requirements. Especially because—and we checked with the New York Times first—it is their written policy that they review every single film that opens in New York for a week’s run. And if it is commercial—or even non-commercial theaters—if you’re going to have a week at the Walter Reade or a week at MOMA—they are required to review every film. So this is not discretionary on the part of [A. O.] Scott or Manohla Dargis whether or not they want to review a film. They hold no keys here, they are no gatekeeper, because it is the policy that the Times review every film, big or small, fiction or nonfiction. Now, that may change. If that changes some day, if they change their policy, we’ll change our policy. In other words, this rule is meant to solidify the distinction between films that are made for theatrical release and those that are made for television broadcast—or, rather, those that have deals for theatrical première and those that have deals for television première. (For my part, I received no advance word of any 2011 New York theatrical release for “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” no notice of press screenings. The _Times review, by Mike Hale, was published at the time of the HBO broadcast, in January, 2012.) Though the difference in format between the open-ended television series and the free-standing feature film is fairly clear, the aesthetic distinction between movies made for television and ones made for projection has long been vague, and is now less clear than ever. The difference affirmed by the Academy is mainly one of circumstance—indeed, as the rule change suggests, of editorial coverage. Moore told me:

The Oscars are set up as an award system for movies that are distributed in movie theatres. That’s what it is. I mean, people get so, “Oh, well, I don’t like that, the Oscars should be for everything,” and maybe the Oscars will change someday, but for right now, TV documentaries have an awards system that’s called “the Emmys,” and movies that are in movie theatres have the Oscars. The real issue that you’re referring to here—and this is really what we should be talking about—is how do documentary filmmakers in this day and age get their films distributed in movie theatres?

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.