Documentary
What Makes an Oscar-Winning Documentary?
Photo by steepways CC BY-SA 2.0
Nothing looks better on your CV than a Oscar or BAFTA-winning credit, but that’s an impossible dream, right? Not necessarily if you do a bit of canny trend-watching and forward planning to make sure you make a documentary with a subject that is guaranteed to catch the Academy’s eye. As the annual Oscars ceremony is here, now seems like a good time to explore previous winners to see what the trends are before you set out with your camera.
This year the following documentaries are up for Best Documentary Feature:
The Cove – An story of animal rights activists trying to expose needless dolphin slaughter in a small cove in Japan, told as a heist caper.
Burma VJ – Tells the story of journalists who film events inside the repressive regime and smuggle their tapes out of the country to foreign news journalists .
Food, Inc. - An expose of how all-powerful corporations control the quality of food in America.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers – How Daniel Ellsberg leaked Pentagon papers to the press, and revealed a secret government policy on Vietnam.
Which Way Home - Follows two boys, Kevin and Fito, who travel atop freight trains in an attempt to reach a better life in the USA.
My money is on The Cove. There are more predictions on the Oscar’s Competition here, which reads like a Who’s Who of UK film critics and entertainment bloggers.
[UPDATE: And the winner is... The Cove)
Sometimes looking back over a number of years can reveal evolving themes, so here are all the Documentary Feature Oscar winners from the last twenty years (visit Wikipedia for a list of winners going back to 1942).
- 1990 American Dream - The story of Hornel Foods meatpacking workers in Austin, Minnesota who staged an unsuccessful strike against a wage cut.
- 1991 In the Shadow of the Stars - Follows the lives of several members of the San Fransisco Opera chorus.
- 1992 The Panama Deception - A critical look at the US invasion of Panama in 1989.
- 1993 I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School - A film profiling pupils in an inner city school in Philadelphia
- 1994 Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision - Profile of American artist Maya Lin.
- 1995 Anne Frank Remembered - The story of Anne Frank, based on her diaries and narrated by Kenneth Branagh.
- 1996 When We Were Kings - The story of the heavyweight championship boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammed Ali held in Zaire (known as the Rumble in the Jungle).
- 1997 The Long Way Home - How the plight of Jewish refugees in the aftermath of WWII led to the creation of the state of Israel.
- 1998 The Last Days - The stories of five Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.
- 1999 One Day in September - Looks at the events surrounding the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
- 2000: Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport - The story of the underground railway that transported more than 10,000 Jewish children to safety.
- 2001: Murder on a Sunday Morning (Un coupable idéal) - Examines a criminal trial in which a fifteen-year-old boy was wrongfully accused of the murder of a tourist in Jacksonville, Florida.
- 2002: Bowling for Columbine - Micheal Moore's exploration of US gun culture.
- 2003: The Fog of War - Profile of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.
- 2004: Born into Brothels - A film about the children of prostitutes in Calutta's red light district.
- 2005: March of the Penguins (La marche de l'empereur) - Natural history film following the arduous yearly journey of emperor penguins in Antarctica.
- 2006: An Inconvenient Truth - Al Gore's lecture and slideshow about the threats posed by climate change.
- 2007: Taxi to the Dark Side - An exploration of the events surrounding the murder of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver, who was detained at the Bagram Air Base before being beaten to death US soldiers.
- 2008: Man on Wire - The story of how Frenchman Philippe Petit evaded security to stage a high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, NYC in 1974, told via archive, interviews and reconstruction.
So if you were choosing your documentary subject purely on the basis that it might win you a shiny statue, it looks as though you'd need to make a documentary film about war (or its aftermath). However, we seem to be in a period of transition where films about the environment are beginning to punch through. Films about children also have a good track record historically. So that bodes well for The Cove, Which Way Home and The Most Dangerous Man in America...Watch this space. And think twice about making a documentary about English cricket if you covet that Oscar statuette.
[UPDATE: As The Cove won the Oscar, the smart money might be on making environmentally-conscious feature documentaries over the next few years if you want to snag an Oscar.]
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