Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Feature

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Documentary Feature

The nominees are:

Ascension

Attica

Flee

Summer of Soul

Writing with Fire

A wrongly overlooked music festival. A tale of bravery and survival against the backdrop of war. An in-depth accounting of one of the darkest chapters of modern American policing. A meditation on the illusion of upward mobility. A tribute to resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Often, there is a through line guiding the nominees in the Documentary Feature category. This year, that through line is simply that they are all great films.

An eclectic slate of nominees highlights a magnificent year for documentary film, in general. The quality of the films not nominated this year – including The First Wave, The Rescue, Faya Dayi and Procession – is evidence of the strength of this group. I have no strong argument against any of the four films I have seen – Writing with First was unavailable to me at the time of this writing – which is a lovely change of pace after one of the worst winners in the history of the category last year. But, let’s not talk about that again.

Summer of Soul – Questlove is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. That’s pretty cool to think about. It makes a certain amount of sense. The Grammy-winning The Roots musician is a polymath and an artistic soul. There was never any reason to doubt he could make a great documentary, but what he has produced with Summer of Soul transcends the genre. It is simply a great, great film.

Intercutting new interviews with long-lost archival footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove (né Amhir Thompson) creates a stunning portrait of a movement and a moment. The film is a celebration of black excellence, as well as a critique of the media forces that kept this excellence hidden for so long. The film’s very existence forces us to question why it took one year to get a Woodstock documentary and more than 50 to get this picture. Every element of the filmmaking is superb, and on top of all of that, the music is just so damn good.

Flee – The presence of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated feature in this category is evidence of how far the documentary branch has come over the years. It is not a perfect branch by any means – the 1994 omission of Hoop Dreams will always loom large over its history, as well as countless other inexplicable snubs – but it was only 33 years ago that The Thin Blue Line was disqualified from competition for relying too much on reenactments. Keep in mind, that film literally saved a man’s life.

Now, we get Flee, a film whose great strength lies in its use of animation to reenact a private history to which we could never otherwise gain access. Though set three decades ago, the story of a family of refugees escaping war and persecution remains sadly relevant, and their struggle to reach a new land remains disappointingly reflective of too many families’ struggles today. Through the life of one man, we gain a greater appreciation for the lives of many, which is what the best documentaries accomplish. This is rightfully among the best.

Attica – I admit to ignorance of the details of the Attica Prison Uprising prior to watching this film. Like many people, I suspect, my memory of its importance comes mostly from Al Pacino’s invocation of the prison during a pivotal moment in Dog Day Afternoon. With this film, director Stanley Nelson takes 50 years of history and makes it feel like a vital piece of the conversation of today.

The filmmaker uses modern-day interviews with several of the former prisoners who participated in the uprising to give context to news footage and archival video of the incident. The slow burn of tension in the standoff and negotiations builds to a harrowing climax when the government forcibly retakes the prison, resulting in the deaths of 33 mostly black and latino inmates and 10 prison employees. All but four were killed by police gunfire. If you have watched any news in the past 50 years, you know what happened to the officers who used excessive force to slay nearly 40 people. Not a thing.

Ascension – A truly fascinating piece of reportage, first-time feature director Jessica Kingdon’s film is a damning indictment of the Chinese Dream, which bears a striking resemblance to the “dream” of another nation that thinks itself all powerful. Kingdon eschews typical narrative structure, instead opting for a series of vignettes to depict the many facets of the Chinese economy. 

At times, the film is shocking in the sheer scope of certain operations within the nation, but where it truly shines is in its patience to linger on the details of life in the Chinese system. Factory work is a combination of mind-numbing repetitiveness and breakneck speed. The business world is all fake pleasantries and shiny facades. Service with a smile comes with the caveat that only certain teeth should be shown in that smile. And, on and on.

Writing with Fire – I intend to watch this film before the show but feel safe in projecting it as running fourth or fifth in the category, given it was the most surprising nominee of the bunch. The first Indian feature to be nominated for Best Documentary, Sushmit Ghosh’s and Rintu Thomas’ film captures the day-to-day lives of the women who run the Khabar Lahariya news agency. I look forward to watching the film, which will debut on PBS the day after the Academy Awards ceremony.

The final analysis

The Documentary category has been home to some great features among the nominees over the years, but recently, I have found the winners less than inspiring. Icarus was a fine winner in 2017, though it beat out the far superior Faces Places. I remain in the minority with serious reservations about 2018’s Free Solo, while American Factory is interesting but not transcendent in the way of Honeyland or The Edge of Democracy, which it beat in 2019. Did I mention already that last year’s My Octopus Teacher is one of the worst winners in the history of the award?

The last truly great film to win this award came in 2016, when Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America took home the prize. I named that film the second-best of the decade, and I stand by that. I bring up all this history to say every one of this year’s nominees that I have seen is better than every previous winner going back to Edelman’s film. So, no matter what wins, a great film will be rewarded.

Summer of Soul is the frontrunner, having won most of the significant critics awards leading up the Oscars and being generally beloved. Music documentaries tend to do very well in this category with recent winners such as 20 Feet from Stardom and Searching for Sugar Man, as well as the aforementioned Woodstock in 1970. 

It is conceivable that the triple-nominated Flee will find enough support to snatch a victory here, but it seems more likely it will go 0-for-3, which is a shame for such a great piece of work. The sneaky pick would be Attica, for which Nelson actually did beat Questlove for the Directors Guild Award for achievement in documentary. The subject matter is right in the Academy’s wheelhouse, and Nelson is a modern master of the historical documentary format who certainly deserves to be rewarded by his peers.

Anything could happen Sunday, and anything would be deserving, which is a refreshing change of pace. Based on all the buzz and its box office popularity, I am going with Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), but if it lands another way, we cannot say we will be surprised.

Will win: Summer of Soul

Should win: Summer of Soul

Should have been here: The First Wave

Next time: Best Original Screenplay

Countdown to the Oscars: Best International Feature

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best International Feature

The nominees are:

Drive My Car

Flee

The Hand of God

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

The Worst Person in the World

Bong Joon-ho probably said it best a couple years ago in the run up to his film Parasite winning four Oscars, including Best Picture, when he called the Academy Awards a “local award.” It sounds a bit derisive, but for most of the history of the organization, that has been undeniably true, with the Academy recognizing primarily US or UK films. The triumph of Parasite, perhaps, signaled a move away from that localized focus.

For the fourth year in a row, a film not primarily in English is nominated for Best Picture (Roma in 2018, Parasite in 2019, Minari in 2020, and Drive My Car this year). That is one film per year and there will always be room for more, but it is a start. One could see a future in which international films are treated to the same Academy Awards bounty as films from the US.

Of this year’s five International Feature nominees, three are nominated in other categories, not to mention Spanish master Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, which is not nominated here but is nominated in two other categories. International films are already a huge part of the Oscars, they are here to stay, and they are only getting more important.

Drive My Car (Japan) – After The Power of the Dog, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour meditation on loss and grief is the next-best reviewed film of the year. It is nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It is an arthouse hit with more than $5 million in box office receipts, and after dropping on HBO Max, it is the most widely seen and talked about nominee of the bunch.

All the accolades and attention, however, can have the effect of clouding the reality of what the film is. Though a similar phenomenon, this is not Parasite, which is a twisty, edge-of-your-seat thriller that’s just a whole lot of fun. Drive My Car is more meditative, more contemplative. It needs to wash over you. Any movie that reaches three hours needs to justify that runtime, and Hamaguchi does so by investing deeply in each of his characters and making the audience empathize with every one of them. The world is so fully formed that by the end, it feels like no time at all has passed.

The Worst Person in the World (Norway) – Directed by Joachim Trier and co-written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, who are nominated for Best Original Screenplay, The Worst Person in the World injects new life into the coming-of-adulthood genre that has grown more prevalent in recent years. There are shades of Frances Ha in this tale of a young Oslo woman attempting to navigate life and love in a modern world, but this film also grapples with darker themes of regret, morality, and death in ways the Noah Baumbach-Greta Gerwig film did not.

Starring Renate Reinsve, who in a just world would be competing for Best Actress, the film chronicles its main character’s slow awakening to the person she is and would like to be. She is not perfect – though she is far from the worst person in the world – and Trier allows her to make mistakes and do bad things without ever judging her. Like so many of us, she is doing her best, and the film argues that as we figure out who we are and what we want to do, our best is all we can offer.

Flee (Denmark) – As mentioned last time, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary is the only film ever nominated for all three of Animated, Documentary, and International Feature. It is wholly deserving of that place in history, as a harrowing document of life on the run from an atrocity. Perhaps the best thing about Flee, though, is the wonderful balance Rasmussen and his subject, “Amin,” strike between the darkness of the details and the humor and humanity of simply surviving. It is a reminder that being alive is, in and of itself, worth celebrating sometimes.

Danish films have a surprisingly strong recent track record in the International Feature (formerly Foreign Language) category. In the past 12 years, Denmark has had seven films nominated at the Academy Awards, with two going on to win the prize. That includes last year’s excellent Another Round, by Thomas Vinterberg. Those seven films also represent six different directors (Vinterberg is twice nominated in that span), suggesting we are living in an exciting time for the Danish film industry. 

The Hand of God (Italy) – Truth be told, this one beguiles me. Paolo Sorrentino’s coming-of-age drama seems to be well liked. It certainly is critically acclaimed. But, it escapes me. I found it a tad slow and navel-gazing. I enjoyed Sorrentino’s earlier The Great Beauty, which won this category in 2013, as a modern riff on La Dolce Vita. It felt, then, like the decadence had a point. But after Youth, which I found interminable, and this film, I look back on The Great Beauty with a different lens and find it more flawed than at first I did.

Sorrentino, the only Italian filmmaker to land in this category in the past 15 years, never gives us much of a reason to care about the characters he depicts. The meandering, self-obsessed plots no longer seem like a commentary on the venality of Italian society, but rather a stylistic crutch for a filmmaker who has little interest in investigating the world outside his own orbit.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (Bhutan) – The shortlist of finalists for International Feature this year is stacked with popular, critically acclaimed titles and directors beloved by the Academy. These included A Hero, Compartment No. 6, I’m Your Man, Hive, and Lamb. Any would have been a deserving and expected nominee. Instead, this light-hearted drama with a seemingly odd title from Bhutanese director Pawo Choyning Dorji beat them all to the punch. And, you know what? I’m glad it did.

This is not a better film than some of the ones I just named – though it is better than The Hand of God – but this nomination ensured I would spend a little under two joyful hours getting to visit this world. The film follows an aspiring singer doing his required national service work as a teacher who gets sent to the small village of Lunana way up in the mountains. The beats of a story about a reluctant teacher growing to love his new assignment and students are familiar, but the uniqueness of this setting and quietness of the story are absolutely winning. As the first film from Bhutan to compete for an Oscar, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is a truly pleasant surprise.

The final analysis

In a post-Parasite world, the statistic remains true: No film nominated for both Best Picture and Best International Feature has failed to win International Feature. On a number of levels, this makes perfect sense, and there is no compelling case to be made in any other direction this year.

If we want to pretend there could be drama simply for the sake of doing so, The Worst Person in the World is beloved and clearly has support, given its Original Screenplay nomination, while the history-making Flee sure feels like it needs to win something. But, as far as this category goes, that is all window dressing. It’s Drive My Car, and it’s not close.

Will win: Drive My Car

Should win: The Worst Person in the World

Should have been here: Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Next time: Best Documentary Feature

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Animated Feature

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Animated Feature

The nominees are:

Encanto

Flee

Luca

The Mitchells vs. the Machines

Raya and the Last Dragon

The Oscar for Animated Feature is in its 21st year, and a sameness is beginning to fall over the category. A couple studios – one studio, if we are being really honest – take up all the air in the room, and the rest are left to fight for scraps. The films nominated this year range from good to great and include one flat-out masterpiece, but the systemic problem remains.

Looking at the numbers, in the 20 years prior to this year, Pixar Animation Studios has garnered 15 nominations and 11 wins, more than half of all Animated Feature Oscars. One of the years it lost, it lost to itself (last year, when Soul bested Onward). DreamWorks Animation has had 13 nominations and two wins, while prior to this year, Disney has been responsible for 11 nominations and three wins. Combined, those three studios – and Disney now owns Pixar – represent 80 percent of all wins in the category. It is not a coincidence that they are three of the biggest animation brands in the world.

One could argue that makes them the class of the animation world and that they are, therefore, deserving of the accolades. In many cases, this may be true, particularly when it comes to some of the Pixar winners. However, what we are really talking about is money. These movies have big budgets, they make boatloads of money at the box office, and their studios can afford pricy awards campaigns. It is often by pure luck an independent animated film is produced at all.

Which brings us to the newest player in the animated feature game: Netflix. Three years running now, Netflix has had a nominee in the category, and I expect the streaming service to continue to compete for this award as long as it has interest in doing so. In the previous two years, Pixar has taken home the prize (Toy Story 4 and Soul), but the Pixar entry this year might be the least likely winner, while the Netflix film has a real chance. Perhaps, this is a changing of the guard, but it feels pretty lateral, as Netflix simply represents another major studio with nothing but money to throw at the problem of winning this award. 

Encanto – One of two Disney nominees this year, Encanto caught fire over the holidays as soon as it dropped on Disney+, and it has not looked back. The conversation about the film stretches beyond its chart-topping soundtrack and ear-wormy No. 1 hit single. Viewers are responding to its tale of generational trauma and forgiveness. Its cultural specificity has brought it much love from the communities it depicts, and its universal themes of love and acceptance have brought audiences from around the globe to this movie.

Set in Colombia, Encanto centers around a young girl, Mirabel, who tries to keep her magical family intact as their magic runs out. They have suffered greatly in the past, and the family matriarch will do anything to prevent them from suffering again, even if her actions threaten to tear them apart. It is beautifully directed by Jared Bush, Byron Howard, and Charise Castro Smith and features amazing songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a stellar voice cast led by Stephanie Beatriz and María Cecilia Botero.

Flee – Encanto would be the best nominated film in most years, but this year, that distinction belongs to this Danish documentary about escaping a war-torn Afghanistan. Flee is the first film ever to be nominated in all three of the Animated, Documentary, and International Feature categories at the Oscars, and there could not be a more deserving film to hold that honor. From director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Flee is an absolute marvel, the flat-out masterpiece I referred to above.

The movie uses animation to bring to life the story of horrors and bravery told by its subject, Amin, whose true identity is withheld to protect him and his family. As a gay boy growing up in Afghanistan at the start of the revolution, the dangers are many for Amin and his family, and animation makes these threats visceral. We do not have to imagine Amin’s terror. We are allowed to see it, in full color, in a way that puts us right there with our true-life hero.

The Mitchells vs. the Machines – The cool-kid pick, directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe and produced by the Into the Spider-Verse team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, this is a movie by film lovers, about film lovers, and for film lovers. It is a family comedy dressed in the garb of a techno-apocalyptic action-adventure film. If that sounds like it crosses a lot of genres, it certainly does, and it does basically all of them well.

The film follows the titular Mitchell clan as they attempt to survive a Terminator-style rise of the machines. The main character, Katie (voiced by Abbi Jacobson of Broad City fame), is an aspiring filmmaker looking to break away from her family and become her own person. The general beats of the story will be familiar to anyone who has watched a lot of coming-of-age stories directed at kids, but the joy of the film lies in its specifics and its attention to detail. Not to mention, the animation is absolutely breathtaking.

Luca – The Pixar entry this year, directed by Enrico Casarosa, Luca is a lovely little story of boyhood and friendship and being yourself but which feels like it came out about a hundred years ago. Released in June 2021 on Disney+, Luca did what so many streaming films and shows do: It dominated the conversation for about a week after it was released, then quickly vanished as the cycle of conversation on the internet moved on.

That is no fault of or knock on the film, but rather an indication of the direction the movie industry is going, even as we transition out of the pandemic – or potentially into the next phase of it. Ten years ago, Luca would have been released wide on 3,000 screens, it would have made $200 million, and it would have been talked about and celebrated for months. We don’t live in that world anymore, and it is hard not to be a little nostalgic for a time when a good film would find an audience and generate real buzz.

Raya and the Last Dragon – This is the other Disney film in the bunch, and it came out even before Luca, released to theaters in March 2021, right as vaccines started rolling out and cinemas started to reopen. It made a little more than $130 million, and in another time, probably would have been a bigger hit. That said, directors Carlos López Estrada and Don Hall walk a fine line with the film’s story, and it does not always work.

Where Encanto succeeds in placing its story in a specifically Colombian context, Raya and the Last Dragon stumbles in attempting to be all things to all people. It is set in a fictional, vaguely East Asian land that is some parts Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and in that lack of specificity, it loses sight of the themes it truly wants to explore. The voice cast, including Kelly Marie Tran and Awkwafina, is fun, and the action is well executed, but one wishes the filmmakers had had a little more courage in their convictions.

The final analysis

Unless Flee can rally a lot of broad Academy support and sneak up from behind to take the prize, this really comes down to two movies: Encanto or The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Encanto is the movie of the moment, popular with everyone and very much in the zeitgeist right here and right now. The Mitchells vs. the Machines, on the other hand, taps into that part of the Academy that loves to reward artists for talking about artists. 

In the past nine years, only once has the Animated Feature Oscar gone to a studio other than Disney or Pixar. That was in 2018, when Into the Spider-Verse beat out The Incredibles 2 (Pixar) and Ralph Breaks the Internet (Disney), so Lord and Miller know a little about beating the House of Mouse. Still, Encanto is everywhere, and it is catching fire at the perfect time with ballots in voters’ hands. Netflix will get this Oscar someday, but for now, Disney is king of the animated castle.

Will win: Encanto

Should win: Flee

Next time: Best International Feature