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Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film

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The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films.

Winners and nominees

Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year (that is, the year they were released under the Academy's rules for eligibility). In practice, due to the limited nature of documentary distribution, a film may be released in different years in different venues, sometimes years after production is complete. Template:TOCDecades40

1940s

In 1942, there was one Documentary category and four winners.

From 1943 there were two separate documentary categories (features and short films)

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2000: Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport – Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer

2001: Murder on a Sunday Morning (Un coupable idéal) – Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet

2002: Bowling for Columbine – Michael Moore and Michael Donovan

2003: The Fog of War – Errol Morris and Michael Williams

2004: Born into Brothels – Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski

2005: March of the Penguins (La marche de l'empereur) – Luc Jacquet

2006: An Inconvenient Truth – Davis Guggenheim

2007: Taxi to the Dark Side – Alex Gibney and Eva Orner

2008: Man on Wire – Simon Chinn and James Marsh

2009: The Cove – Louie Psihoyos

Controversies

Many critically acclaimed documentaries are not nominated. Examples include The Thin Blue Line, Roger & Me, Touching the Void, Hoop Dreams, and Fahrenheit 9/11 (see below). The controversy over Hoop Dreams was enough to force the Academy Awards to change their documentary voting system.[1]

For example, Grizzly Man, a documentary strong enough to appear on many critics' top 10 lists[2] was not nominated, and did not even make the Academy's internally distributed top 15 list. Grizzly Man's exclusion was later revealed to be the result of an Academy rule disqualifying documentary films that are constructed entirely out of archive footage. However, Grizzly Man included new interviews and other footage shot exclusively for the film.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, at the time the highest grossing documentary film ever made, was ineligible because Moore had opted to have it played on television prior to the 2004 Election. Conversely, the 1982 winner Just Another Missing Kid, directed by John Zaritsky, was created by editing together footage he originally shot for the Canadian investigative journalism TV show The Fifth Estate.

References

  • "Awards Database". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 2010-02-12.
  1. ^ "Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert: Hoop Dreams: from short subject to major league"; current.org; July 30, 1995.
  2. ^ criticstop10.net
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