Best Documentary Feature:

The Best Documentary Feature category has often been among the most difficult to predict early on with heavy favorites regularly missing nominations entirely, but recent years have seen a number of shifts in the category recognizing those films with the most acclaim more frequently. This year, Flee, a Danish animated documentary detailing the life of a gay man who fled Afghanistan as a child, becomes the second film nominated for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film and the first to also achieve a nomination for Best Animated Feature Film (though the case can be made that most documentaries should also get consideration for Best Editing). Seeing these films popping up in a number of categories and challenging the ideas of what the traditional nominee looks like is a welcome signifier of the changing Academy membership.

Among other international nominees for Best Documentary Feature are Ascension, a film that explores the idea of the Chinese Dream, and Writing with Fire, the first Indian nominee in the category that follows the shift to the digital age of a newspaper run by Dalit women. Musician Questlove’s first film and early favorite, Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) gives a vibrant look at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and the context surrounding it and has already swept six awards at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards and been nominated for a Grammy. Finally, Attica reexamines the famous prison uprising with interviews of various inmates.

Prediction: Flee

Best Documentary Short Subject: 

Among the eight categories to have been cut from the live broadcast at the time of writing, Best Documentary – Short Subject is nonetheless a vital category and one of the most fascinating to follow every year. With its abbreviated length, it opens the door for filmmakers to explore subjects that would generally not be covered in a feature length documentary and often serves as an intimate window into the lives of smaller filmmakers from around the world and the issues they are most passionate about. These are often filmmakers who receive little other recognition or compensation for their work and who benefit hugely from the recognition they can receive here.

This year, Netflix continues their huge showing in below the line categories with Audible, a documentary following a deaf football player in the leadup to his final homecoming game, Lead Me Home, which explores homelessness in West Coast America, and Three Songs for Benazir, following an Afghan man in a displacement camp. Ben Proudfoot, nominated last year for A Concerto Is a Conversation, is nominated once again with The Queen of Basketball, which details the life of Lusia Harris, the only woman ever drafted by the NBA. Rounding out the year’s nominees is When We Were Bullies, a film that sees director Jay Rosenblatt track down his fifth grade teacher and consider a bullying incident from his youth, exploring his own complicity.

Prediction: The Queen of Basketball

Best Live Action Short Film:

The lives of women are at the center of two of the nominees for Best Live Action Short Film, the first of which is Ala Kachuu – Take and Run. The film centers on a woman who wishes to study in Bishkek, but is kidnapped and taken to the hinterland. Upon arrival, she is forced to be a bride or become a pariah if she refuses the marriage. Limited with her options, she strives to resist the traditions of her country. The short film The Dress revolves around a maid who works at a budget motel in rural Poland. She encounters a truck driver who visits the motel repeatedly. She is lonely, but can this man cure her loneliness? Also within the selection is On My Mind, a film inspired by the director’s experience of losing his daughter. Within On My Mind, a man performs karaoke for his wife. His choice of song? Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind”. 

A relatively high profile short film from this year’s selection is The Long Goodbye, a short film inspired by Riz Ahmed’s concept album of the same name. The Long Goodbye compares the relationship between the United Kingdom and the South Asians and British Asian people to that akin to an abusive relationship in light of Brexit and the rise of far right movements. Also pertaining to social matters is Please Hold, a film in which a man is arrested by a police drone by mistake. His imprisonment lacks any human influence; it is completely automated. What chance of justice does he have?

Prediction: The Long Goodbye