The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has come up with a very weird way of choosing documentaries that it will consider for an Oscar nomination. Now, only those films that have been reviewed by The NY Times or the LA Times will be considered by the Academy. We all know that these newspapers review only the most mainstream, boring, innocuous kind of movies anybody can imagine. As a result, the entire category of documentary films will be gutted.
I have always used the Oscars as a guide to movies I need to avoid. The only category that sometimes offered some good films on its shortlist was that of the documentary. And now that’s been shot to hell. The Academy has explained its decision by saying that there are too many films coming out and it’s hard to watch them all. So it decided to relegate the decision-making to the film critics writing for two papers selected in an arbitrary manner.
Clarissa's Blog 