Oscars 101: Best Documentary Feature

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

And now we graduate from shorts to features.  Shorts are all well enough, I suppose, but feature-length is where it's really at.  And I'm not just talking about Best Picture or Documentaries, either, but overall.  There's a reason why cinematic shorts are a dying art form.  This years nominees for Best Documentary Feature are:

CitizenFour
Finding Vivian Maier
Last Days in Vietnam
The Salt of the Earth
Virunga

Looking at the list of nominees, I can't help but wonder where Life Itself - the Roger Ebert documentary based on his own memoirs - is.  Documenting the life and death of the man who was considered the definitive end on film criticism for the last five decades, its a revealing look into an overlooked aspect of cinema.  Given his strongly opinionated reviews for films over so long a span of time, the snub is both shocking and understandable, but that doesn't make it any less infuriating.

CitizenFour - Hardly a person in the country doesn't know who Edward Snowden is by now.  The former Systems Administrator for the CIA leaked classified NSA intelligence over growing concerns of the government's patently illegal surveillance practices before seeking political asylum abroad.  Using the moniker "CitizenFour," he contacted director Laura Poitras in 2013, resulting in one of the largest intelligence leaks in modern history.

Much like with the Documentary Shorts, timeliness and the gravity of its subject matter greatly factor into a documentary's chances of success at the Academy Awards.  That, plus the Academy's generally liberal stance on social issues, makes this the film to beat.  No film covers a more contemporarily relevant topic, nor with such monumental importance behind it.

Finding Vivian Maier - This documentary explores the life of Chicago-based nanny and photographer Vivian Maier, who was largely unregarded in her lifetime and has only recently seen a surge of interest in her work.  Through interviews with those who knew her first hand, the film explores the person that she was and the photography that is only now making her famous.

While Finding Vivian Maier is certainly a fine piece of film making, it lacks the urgent weight of importance that so often informs the winner of this category.  Going up against Snowden's intelligence leaks, the fall of Siagon and the defense of the Virunga National Park, a retrospective of an unknown photographer just isn't going to make the grade.

Last Days in Vietnam - This controversial look into the final days of US involvement in Vietnam - leading up to and including the fall of Saigon - is well received enough and high profile enough to have won in most other years, where there's little an less of interest competing for Best Documentary Feature.  But 2014 was an incredible year for movies, documentaries included, and it finds itself falling just short of where it needs to be to take home an Oscar on Sunday.

That's not to say that it has no chance at all of winning, just that it doesn't have much of one.  Last Days in Vietnam has been charged with waxing a bit too favorably on US involvement in Vietnam, particularly in how it fails to show the devastation that the troops caused in that country.  It is also strongly removed from the immediacy of the present, which keeps it from feeling "important enough" for the Academy.

The Salt of the Earth - If Finding Vivian Maier stood any kind of a chance of winning the category, The Salt of the Earth stole it away.  Focusing on the career of Brazilian photographer Sabastão Salgado, it means to carve out its support from the exact same demographic that would have voted for Finding Vivian Maier.

With both films lacking political urgency, they stand poised to split their pool of support between them, leaving neither with enough to break the lead that CitizenFour holds over the other nominees.  There is simply not enough support to spread itself between two all too similar documentaries.

Virunga - Outside of its Oscar nomination, the only thing that I had heard about this film before now was from my sister:

Wow, one of the most inspiring and moving films I have seen in years. Everyone should watch this gripping documentary, it's much more complex and amazing than it sounds.

The film documents the efforts of four people to keep the Virunga National Park operational in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The park, which is home to the last Mountain Gorillas on the planet, is faced with the dangers of war, poaching and capitalist oil exploration.  It showcases the impossibly beautiful landscape of the park while exploring the issues which threaten its survival in an increasingly developed world.

Safe Bet: CitizenFour

Long Shot: Virunga

Longer Shot:  Last Days in Vietnam

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