Netflix and filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir scored big as the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Feature was released this morning.
Netflix landed three films on the shortlist of documentaries that will continue in the race for an Oscar nomination: The Perfect Neighbor, directed by Geeta Gandbhir; Cover-Up, directed by Oscar winner Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus; and Apocalypse in the Tropics, directed by Oscar nominee Petra Costa.
Gandbhir earned the distinction of making two shortlists – with The Perfect Neighbor on the feature list and The Devil Is Busy, co-directed by Christalyn Hampton, on the shortlist of short documentaries.
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Scroll for the full list of films to make the cut for doc feature and doc short.
Notable in today’s announcement were the snubs: no shortlist recognition for My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay, the Law & Order: SVU star’s exploration of the life and career of her late mother, actress Jayne Mansfield. It earned a slot on the PGA Awards nominations list last week but got no love today.
Once again, the Academy’s doc branch, which determines the nonfiction shortlists, proved rather allergic to anything with a whiff of celebrity to it. Failing to make the shortlist along with My Mom Jayne were documentaries about Liza Minnelli, Marlee Matlin, Eddie Murphy, Led Zeppelin, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, singer-guitarist Jeff Buckley, Selena Quintanilla and her family, Ben Stiller’s portrait of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, cartoonist Art Spiegelman, Diane Warren, and more. Warren, however, earned a spot on the Best Original Song shortlist for her tune “Dear Me” from the documentary about her, Diane Warren: Relentless. (If Warren goes on to earn an Oscar nomination for the song, it will be her 9th consecutive nomination in that category and 17th overall, though she has yet to win a competitive Oscar).
Among snubs, none was bigger than the omission of The Tale of Silyan, the National Geographic documentary directed by Tamara Kotevka, an Oscar nominee for Honeyland. Earlier this month, it won the IDA Award for Best Feature Documentary, and it also earned a PGA Award nomination last week, as well as a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination.
Another notable omission: no shortlist recognition for Raoul Peck’s documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, his acclaimed film on the author of 1984. The feature, released by Neon, won two awards at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards earlier this year and was recently named as one of the top 5 docs of the year by the National Board of Review.
A record 201 feature documentaries qualified for the Oscars this year, making the odds of earning a place on the shortlist all the slimmer.
Two documentaries about Russia did make the shortlist: Mr. Nobody Against Putin, directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin, and My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow, directed by Julia Loktev. The latter film, with a running time of 5h 24m, examines independent journalists in Russia who were put on an official list of “undesirable people” along with their organizations after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as the Kremlin under Putin cracked down on any form of dissent.
Two films relating to Israel and Gaza also made the shortlist: Holding Liat, directed by Brandon Kramer, and Coexistence My Ass!, directed by Amber Fares. Neither of those films has U.S. distribution.
Coexistence, My Ass! centers on Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi who was raised north of Jerusalem in Neve Shalom/Wāħat as-Salām — Oasis of Peace — a cooperative community where Jews and Palestinians choose to live together. She passionately advocates for absolute equality between Palestinians and Israelis, not mere tepid “coexistence.” Holding Liat, meanwhile, examines the family of an Israeli American woman, Liat Beinin Atzili, who was seized by Hamas during the October 7 terror attack on Israel. Her parents, Yehuda and Chaya Beinin, headed to Washington, DC where they worked with Biden administration officials to win their daughter’s release, but Yehuda and Chaya insisted that any response to the Hamas attack should not dehumanize Palestinians.
The documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, about the Palestinian poet and photographer Fatma Hassona, did not make the shortlist, despite earning many awards around the world and the National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award.
Of interest to documentary fans, four songs from docs earned a spot on the shortlist for Best Original Song, including the aforementioned “Dear Me” by Diane Warren. The others:
- “Dying To Live” from Billy Idol Should Be Dead
- “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” from Come See Me in the Good Light
- “Sweet Dreams Of Joy” from Viva Verdi!
Netflix also made the shortlist of short documentaries with All the Empty Rooms, directed by Oscar nominee Joshua Seftel.
Joining that film on the shortlist of short docs are All the Walls Came Down, director Ondi Timoner’s film about the wildfire that destroyed the Los Angeles neighborhood of Altadena where Timoner lived with her wife; Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, the film directed by Craig Renaud and posthumously by Brent Renaud – the photographer and journalist who was killed in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Perfectly a strangeness, the short documentary by Alison McAlpine that we wrote about last week, stars three donkeys. We Were the Scenery tells an absorbing and often funny story of Hoa Thi Che and Hue Nguyen Che who left Vietnam as “boat people” after the Vietnam War, landing in the Philippines. There, while living in a refugee camp, they are other Vietnamese refugees were cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Nominations for Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short will be determined by the Academy’s documentary branch. Nomination voting begins on Monday, Jan. 12 and ends on Friday, Jan. 16. Nominations for the 98th Academy Awards will be announced on Thursday, January 22.
These are the films shortlisted in the documentary categories for the 98th Oscars:
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM
Fifteen films will advance in the Documentary Feature Film category for the 98th Academy Awards. Two hundred one films were eligible in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
“The Alabama Solution”
“Apocalypse in the Tropics”
“Coexistence, My Ass!”
“Come See Me in the Good Light”
“Cover-Up”
“Cutting through Rocks”
“Folktales”
“Holding Liat”
“Mr. Nobody against Putin”
“Mistress Dispeller”
“My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 – Last Air in Moscow”
“The Perfect Neighbor”
“Seeds”
“2000 Meters to Andriivka”
“Yanuni”
DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM
Fifteen films will advance in the Documentary Short Film category for the 98th Academy Awards. One hundred seventeen films qualified in the category. Members of the Documentary Branch vote to determine the shortlist and the nominees.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by title, are:
“All the Empty Rooms”
“All the Walls Came Down”
“Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud”
“Bad Hostage”
“Cashing Out”
“Chasing Time”
“Children No More: “Were and Are Gone””
“Classroom 4”
“The Devil Is Busy”
“Heartbeat”
“Last Days on Lake Trinity”
“On Healing Land, Birds Perch”
“Perfectly a Strangeness”
“Rovina’s Choice”
“We Were the Scenery”