Documentarians with the Most Awards:
Arthur Cohn – 3 awards (4 nominations);
Simon Chinn – 2 awards;
Jacques-Yves Cousteau – 2 awards;
Walt Disney – 2 awards (7 nominations; Disney has additional 2 wins in the Documentary Short Subject category);
Rob Epstein – 2 awards;
Marvin Hier – 2 awards;
Barbara Kopple – 2 awards
Controversies
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, at the time the highest-grossing documentary film in history, was ruled ineligible because it played on TV 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 TV at the time of its nomination.
In 1990, a group of 45 filmmakers filed a protest to the Academy over a potential conflict of interest involving Block. They noted that Block was a member of the Documentary Steering Committee, which selects films as nominees, but 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 Best Documentary Feature. They noted that Michael Moore’s Roger & Me (Warner Brothers) was omitted from the nominees, although it had been highly praised by numerous critics and was ranked 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 chose it as the best 1994, wrote: “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 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. After protests by many documentarians, the nominating system subsequently was 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 short list are diminished greatly. So they’ve got to do something, I think, to make the process more sane for deciding the shortlist.”
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 one week in both of those cities. Advocating for 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.”
The awards process has been criticized for emphasizing the documentary’s subject matter over style or quality.
In 2014, following the announcement of the shortlist of eligible feature nominees, Sony Pictures Classics co-president Tom Bernard publicly criticized Academy documentary voters after they excluded SPC’s Red Army from the shortlist.
Icarus, another documentary related to sports and Russian-American relations, later won the Oscar.
In 2017, after the win of the eight-hour O.J.: Made in America in this category, the Academy determined that multi-part and limited series would be ineligible for the award, even if they are not broadcast after their Oscar-qualifying release (as was O.J.: Made in America).
Acclaimed Docus Not Nominated for Best Documentary:
Don’t 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)
Grizzly Man (2005)
The King of Kong (2007)
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)
Stories We Tell (2013)
Life Itself (2014)
Cameraperson (2016)
Jane (2017)
Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018)
Apollo 11 (2019)
One Child Nation (2019)
Documentaries with Wins or Nominations in Other Categories:
Though Academy rules do not expressly preclude documentaries from being nominated in other competitive categories, documentaries are typically considered ineligible for nominations in categories that presume the work is fictitious, including Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and acting.
No documentaries have been nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, or writing.
No documentary has yet been nominated for Best Picture, although Chang was nominated in the “Unique and Artistic Production” category at the 1927-28 awards.
At the 3rd Academy Awards, prior to the introduction of documentary category, With Byrd at the South Pole won the Best Cinematography, the first docu both to be nominated for and win an Oscar.
Woodstock was the first documentary to be nominated for Best Film Editing, while Hoop Dreams was the second (although it was not nominated for Best Documentary Feature).
Woodstock is also the only documentary to receive a nomination for Best Sound Mixing.
Honeyland became the first documentary to be nominated for both Best International Feature Film and Best Documentary Feature.
Israel’s Waltz with Bashir became the first docu and first animation nominated for Best International Feature, although it was not nominated for Best Documentary Feature.
Seven documentaries have received nominations for Best Original Song:
Mondo Cane (for Riz Ortolani and Nino Oliviero’s “More”)
An Inconvenient Truth (for Melissa Etheridge’s “I Need to Wake Up”, the first and only nominee from a documentary to win)
Chasing Ice (for J. Ralph’s “Before My Time”)
Racing Extinction (for Ralph and Anhoni’s “Manta Ray”)
Jim: The James Foley Story (for Ralph and Sting’s “The Empty Chair”)
The Hunting Ground (for Lady Gaga and Dianne Warren’s “Til It Happens To You”), and RBG (for Warren’s “I’ll Fight”).
Honorary Oscars:
Five documentary filmmakers have received honorary Oscars: Pete Smith, William L. Hendricks, D. A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman, and Agnès Varda.
