Oscar Nominations: Documentaries

by James McNally on January 24, 2007

in Awards,Documentaries,Oscars

The nom­in­a­tions were announced for the Oscars yes­terday. I’ve been seeing fewer fea­ture films lately, but I do manage to catch more doc­u­ment­aries. Of the five nom­inees, I’ve only seen two so far, but I plan to try to see all of them if I can before the Academy Awards are handed out on February 25.

The nom­inees for Best Documentary are:

  • Deliver Us From Evil
  • An Inconvenient Truth
  • Iraq in Fragments
  • Jesus Camp
  • My Country, My Country

It’s nice to see that doc­u­mentary film is serving some of its most important pur­poses in these films: to bear wit­ness, and to kick us in the con­science. It’s inter­esting to note that two films deal with Christianity (both deal with forms of toxic Christianity, in my opinion), two deal with the Iraq war, and one with a global crisis. No uplifting films, this year, sadly. Times are tough.

If you’ve seen any of these, what did you think? Who’s your bet to win? My money is on Al Gore’s sobering PowerPoint present­a­tion on cli­mate change. Not the most cre­at­ively filmed, but cer­tainly the most urgent, and it man­aged to present inform­a­tion in an enter­taining and mostly guilt-free way that made me want to make some changes to the way I live.

UPDATE: In a bit of cross-blog linkery, I’ve listed the losers in this cat­egory for the past few years over at Runner-Up! Check ‘em out!

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