Salon.com
January 9, 2012
By Andrew O’Hehir
As multiple media sources have reported over the last two days, under proposed new Academy rules, only films that have been reviewed by the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times will be eligible for the best documentary Oscar. But that’s not the real story, and it’s not nearly as dumb as it sounds.
“Everybody’s getting excited about something that’s not the real headline,” explains filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack, a co-founder of the documentary-centric Cinema Eye Honors awards. “The headline is that the Academy is making big changes to the way it selects and nominates documentary films, and based on what I know so far, those changes are overwhelmingly positive.”
Perhaps the first thing to understand is that the new docu-Oscar rules, which go much further than eligibility issues, were largely pushed through by Michael Moore, who sits on the Academy’s governing board. The intention behind the changes, including the bizarre-sounding NYT/LAT requirement, is to streamline a notoriously clunky and cliquey nominating process, and to ensure that the Oscar-winning documentary is “truly a theatrical motion picture, because that’s what these awards are for,” as Moore told indieWIRE.
