Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11, at the time the highest-grossing documentary film in movie history, was ruled ineligible because Moore had opted to have it played on television prior to the 2004 election. Previously, the 1982 winner
Just Another Missing Kid had already been broadcast in Canada and won that country's ACTRA award for excellence in television at the time of its nomination. In 1990, a group of 45 filmmakers filed a protest to the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over a potential conflict of interest involving
Mitchell Block. They noted that Block was a member of the Documentary Steering Committee, which selects films as nominees, but he had a conflict of interest because his company Direct Cinema owned the distribution rights to three of the five films (including eventual winner
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt selected that year as nominees for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. They noted that
Michael Moore's
Roger & Me (distributed by
Warner Brothers) was omitted from the nominees, although it had been highly praised by numerous critics and was ranked by many critics as one of the top ten films of the year. The controversy over
Hoop Dreams exclusion was enough to have the Academy Awards begin the process to change its documentary voting system. Roger Ebert, who had declared it to be the best 1994 movie of any kind, looked into its failure to receive a nomination: "We learned, through very reliable sources, that the members of the committee had a system. They carried little flashlights. When one gave up on a film, he waved a light on the screen. When a majority of flashlights had voted, the film was switched off.
Hoop Dreams was stopped after 15 minutes." The Academy's executive director, Bruce Davis, took the unprecedented step of asking accounting firm
Price Waterhouse to turn over the complete results of that year's voting, in which members of the committee had rated each of the 63 eligible documentaries on a scale of six to ten. "What I found," said Davis, "is that a small group of members gave zeros (actually low scores) to every single film except the five they wanted to see nominated. And they gave tens to those five, which completely skewed the voting. There was one film that received more scores of ten than any other, but it wasn't nominated. It also got zeros (low scores) from those few voters, and that was enough to push it to sixth place." In 2000, Arthur Cohn, the producer of the winning
One Day in September boasted "I won this without showing it in a single theater!" Cohn had hit upon the tactic of showing his Oscar entries at invitation-only screenings, and to as few other people as possible. Oscar bylaws at the time required voters to have seen all five nominated documentaries; by limiting his audience, Cohn shrank the voting pool and improved his odds. Following protests by many documentarians, the nominating system was subsequently changed.
Hoop Dreams director
Steve James said "With so few people looking at any given film, it only takes one to dislike a film, and its chances for making the shortlist are diminished greatly. So they've got to do something, I think, to make the process more sane for deciding the shortlist." Among other rule changes taking effect in 2013, the academy began requiring a documentary to have been reviewed by either
The New York Times or
Los Angeles Times, and be commercially released for at least one week in both of those cities. Advocating the rule change, Michael Moore said "When people get the award for best documentary and they go on stage and thank the Academy, it's not really the Academy, is it? It's 5% of the Academy." In 2014, following the announcement of the shortlist of eligible feature documentary nominees,
Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard publicly criticized Academy documentary voters after they excluded SPC's
Red Army from the shortlist. "It's a sign of some really old people in the documentary area of the Academy. There's a lot of people who are really up in their years. It's shocking to me that that film (
Red Army) didn't get in," Bernard said. Additionally, in his reporting of the Oscar documentary shortlist exclusions that year,
The Hollywood Reporter Scott Feinberg reacted to
Red Army omission: "...no matter which 15 titles the doc branch selected, plenty of other great ones would be left on the outside. That is the case, most egregiously, with
Gabe Polsky's
Red Army (Sony Classics), a masterful look at the role of sports in society and
Russian-American relations". (
Icarus, another documentary related to sports and Russian-American relations, later won the Oscar.) In 2017, following the win of the eight-hour
O.J.: Made in America in this category, the Academy announced that multi-part and limited series would be ineligible for the award in the future, even if they are not broadcast after their Oscar-qualifying release (as was
O.J.: Made in America). Various other acclaimed documentaries have not been nominated such as: •
Dont Look Back (1967) •
Salesman (1969) •
Gimme Shelter (1970) •
Grey Gardens (1975) •
Gates of Heaven (1978) •
Stop Making Sense (1984) •
Shoah (1985) •
The Thin Blue Line (1988) •
Roger & Me (1989) •
Paris Is Burning (1990) •
Crumb (1994) •
Hoop Dreams (1994) •
The Celluloid Closet (1995) •
American Movie (1999) •
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) •
Grizzly Man (2005) •
Stories We Tell (2013) •
Blackfish (2013) •
Life Itself (2014) •
Red Army (2014) •
Going Clear (2015) •
Cameraperson (2016) •
Quest (2017) •
Jane (2017) • ''
Won't You Be My Neighbor?'' (2018) •
They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) •
Apollo 11 (2019) •
Boys State (2020) == Documentaries with wins or nominations in other categories ==