Documentaries As Predictors of Best Picture Winners

Moonlight

• O.J.: Made in America (Winner)
• 13th
• I Am Not Your Negro
• Fire at Sea
• Life, Animated

The first year we made it a personal mission to watch every single nominee was the first year I started betting on the Oscars: the year Moonlight won in 2017 (for the 2016 film year.) After watching all the nominees, it clicked for me that Moonlight would pull the upset over La La Land and put money on it at +415. The reason why was because of, oddly enough, the documentaries. That year, O.J.: Made in America, I Am Not Your Negro, and 13th were all nominated, and I got the sense that the Academy was pointing towards challenges of being a black American, especially because these three were the top three favorites to win the statuette. The main character in Moonlight could never truly be who he really was due to circumstances beyond his control, a theme across those three documentaries. To some extent, the other two documentaries had that theme as well, Syrian refugees in Fire at Sea and people with autism in Life, Animated. Couple that with the major diversity push from the Academy, I knew in my heart that the poetic Moonlight, with its haunting Nicholas Britell score, would come away with a Best Picture win.

The Shape of Water

• Icarus (Winner)
• Faces Places
• Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
• Last Men in Aleppo
• Strong Island

The next year, the two docs that had a realistic chance of winning were Icarus and Faces Places. Icarus was an absolutely crazy roller coaster ride as the documentary took a major shift. It starts out with the filmmaker documenting his experiment of taking steroids for bicycle racing under the advisement of a Russian doctor when eventually that same Russian doctor got caught up in the Russian Olympic Team doping scandal. Faces Places, on the other hand, was about whimsical art in unexpected places. Couple crazy with whimsical art, and that sure sounds like The Shape of Water. According to the betting odds, The Shape of Water winning over Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was technically an upset. Even Abacus and Strong Island convey a sense of unjustified confinement, much like the creature in The Shape of Water.

Green Book

• Free Solo (Winner)
• Hale County This Morning, This Evening
• Minding the Gap
• Of Fathers and Sons
• RBG

I ignored my gut in my Oscar pool, but who in their right mind predicted Green Book to actually win? I still put money on a Green Book best picture win on my sportsbook because it had good value, but the lack of a director nomination deterred me from officially predicting it as a winner. However, the documentaries that year nagged at me. The favorite doc to win that year was the eventual winner Free Solo. There was also the obligatory Syria doc, which are always so poignant and heart-crushing, but the other three were Hale County, Minding the Gap, and RBG, the latter being the closest contender to the overwhelming favorite Free Solo. These docs just don’t have that controversial topic that are often present in documentary nominees of other years. They are all important stories, but not really calling for vast societal change. They were just fairly vanilla human stories. That eliminated BlacKkKlansman and Roma (only because Netflix is controversial for the Academy). Also Green Book is more feel-good than the other nominees, much like Free Solo and RBG. It’s hard for me to describe it, but after watching the last doc and looking at them, I just felt a Green Book vibe. The lack of directing nom scared me in the pool, but still put some money on it in the sportsbook, so not a total loss. The point is, that year I valued a Best Director nomination more than what the documentary features were telling me, only reinforcing my belief that there is something to this connection between docs and narratives.

Parasite

• American Factory (Winner)
• The Cave
• The Edge of Democracy
• For Sama
• Honeyland

Parasite upset 1917 according to the betting odds, albeit it wasn’t that big of an upset. Not one, but two, Syrian documentaries were nominated, For Sama and The Cave. Honeyland was also nominated for best foreign-language film for the first time in many years. The Edge of Democracy from Brazil secured a somewhat unlikely nomination. Lastly, the eventual winner, American Factory, conveyed a contrast of Chinese and American business practices and its workers. Every single one of them was an international story, even American Factory. This seemed to imply that the Academy was ready for international stories not only to be embraced, but to be widely viewed given that one of these documentaries was guaranteed to win. Parasite broke a LOT of barriers. Since then, international films have been represented more across all categories, including Best Picture. Parasite is a remarkable film, and it opened the floodgates of a voting body who became hungry for more international stories.

Nomadland

• My Octopus Teacher (Winner)
• Collective
• Crip Camp
• The Mole Agent
• Time

In the first year of the pandemic, the cinematic landscape was drastically changed, with Tenet being the only true blockbuster released that year. One film was the clear favorite to win Best Picture, and if anyone predicted something else to win Best Picture, they were using some faulty assumptions. The doc race really was between two docs: My Octopus Teacher and Time. A case can be made for Crip Camp, but that would’ve mildly surprised many pundits. Time highlights oversentencing in the prison industrial complex, but it’s more about the human element. All five, including Time, really have a theme of modest people (or modest cephalopods) trying to make it in a big ol’ world. What movie does that remind you of? The correct answer is Nomadland. If I thought too hard, four of these docs are people going up against a large government establishment, which kind of hints at Trial of the Chicago 7, but the fact that My Octopus Teacher was the favorite with Time focusing more on the people instead of the fight, pointed me to Nomadland, confirming its status as frontrunner.

CODA

• Summer of Soul (Winner)
• Ascension
• Attica
• Flee
• Writing with Fire

Last year, CODA defied a lot of expectations, but when it was closer to Oscar night, many had a feeling that CODA had enough industry love to win, undoubtedly helped by the preferential ballot. I firmly believe it’s impossible not to like CODA, and there is a (weak) argument to be made that it wasn’t deserving of a Best Picture win, even the people on that side will contend that it’s a very enjoyable movie. It’s a rare movie that can appeal to everyone. But how did last year’s documentary nominees point to CODA and not The Power of the Dog or Belfast? CODA is a story centered around a deaf family, a marginalized group in society. Take a look at every single nominee for Best Documentary. They, too, are highlighting marginalized groups. (They also highlighted forgotten pieces of history, which could’ve honestly pointed to Belfast, which is why I contend that Belfast was the second contender after CODA, not The Power of the Dog, just because of the documentaries.) Anyway, the eventual winner, Summer of Soul, highlighted the marginalized black community at a peaceful music festival that was largely forgotten. The others were Flee (homosexuals in Afghanistan), Attica (the prison population), Writing with Fire (women in India), and Ascension (lower-class Chinese citizens.)

Intermission: Counterpoints

Claiming that the nominated documentaries correlate to the Best Picture winner is a stretch, at best, and I realize that. There are no data supporting this, and some sort of metric would be hard to develop, especially when we already know who won each year. A good metric is one that is reproducible, and assigning some sort of measure of documentary genre vs. Best Picture winner would have different measurements depending on who the observer is. Even if a metric could be devised, we would need more data points, a limitation of time series data such as this. This claim is not supported by anything more than case studies and anecdotal, circumstantial evidence. It’s also supported by fully embracing some characteristic of the documentary and how those same characteristics are shared with the predicted Best Picture winner, while ignoring others. For example, I had toyed with predicting 1917 winning over Parasite because although each documentary featured an international story, each documentary also featured a person or small group of people trying to accomplish a large, complex task against significant factors. What movie does that sound like?

I broached this subject with Ben Zauzmer, writer of the book Oscarmetrics, and he said, “It’s always tricky with this type of analysis to not overfit. In hindsight, it can become easy to convince yourself that two winning movies had similar genres, because many movies share universal, overlapping themes. It’s harder to apply this type of thing to the future, both because we don’t yet know the Documentary winner (we just have frontrunners), and because it’s not clear-cut which docs correspond with which feature films.” He has a good point, because we are basically using predictors as input to this one predictor, something that does not strengthen any model. After all, the same logic that pointed to Nomadland as the eventual winner could have just as easily been applied to Minari, a wonderful film that had little realistic chance of winning. Any kind of metric would also have to be a composite model that incorporates other predictors, like betting lines, precursors, etc.

Intermission: Documentary Snubs

Also, how can the documentaries appear to align so closely to the eventual best picture winner? It’s hard to rectify these highly coincidental parallels. However, a whole bunch of documentaries are released each year, and what is REALLY hard is to see what films, let alone documentaries, resonate with people, especially the Academy. What is interesting, though, is there are a few examples of a glaring omission from the documentary nominees. In 2017, the documentary Jane was viewed as a shoo-in for an Oscar win, let alone a nomination. It got neither. A documentary with a strong woman protagonist might’ve moved my needle to Three Billboards, but because it didn’t even secure a nomination, the needle found The Shape of Water. Consider also Won’t You Be My Neighbor? from 2018, a documentary that could’ve been seen as controversial for the simple fact of how the Academy viewed conservatives in the Donald Trump era, even ones as widely loved as Mr. Rogers. In the same year, Three Identical Strangers also got snubbed, which does hint at systemic change. Also consider Apollo 11 from 2019, which would’ve been the only documentary not featuring an international story. My point is that documentary snubs can offer some insight on where the hive mind of the Academy is.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

• All That Breathes
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Fire of Love
• A House Made of Splinters
• Navalny

In case you didn’t pick up on the subtext, my predicted winner, as is the predicted winners among many prognosticators, is Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s the current favorite based on the fact it got a whopping 11 nominations and it’s the betting favorite at all the sportsbooks I’ve seen. However, since Moonlight won, the favorite has only won one out of six times, with Nomadland being the only one to do it, putting the so-called “favorite” moniker at risk for being nothing more than a false label. Nevertheless, I just don’t see any other film competing for Best Picture this year, and the nominated documentary features are why.

After seeing each one, there is a heavy vibe of Everything Everywhere All at Once, more than any other nominated film. The overarching theme I’m picking up on after watching each nominee is intersectionality. All these documentaries explore at least two important motifs, some as a backdrop while others are more exploratory. While all films explore more than one theme, documentaries seem to be more focused. Everything Everywhere All at Once, as the title suggests, is exploring a LOT of universal themes as the characters explore multiple universes, one of which is holding multiple simultaneous but conflicting thoughts.

In All That Breathes, kites are a crucial part of the urban ecosystem, but the documentary takes it a step further to use the kites as a metaphor for Indian systemic change. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the presumptive frontrunner, the main focus is holding the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis, but to get where this becomes the main focus, the documentary explores the struggles of the homosexual and art communities. Fire of Love is a quirky love story of volcanologists, and the vibe of it just screams EEAAO. A House Made of Splinters is a heart-wrenching story of a temporary home for at-risk children, sometimes being the last stop before eventually going to the orphanage. Alone that would be hugely impactful, but it hits different when you pile on the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. And lastly, Navalny is the biggest stretch of drawing parallels to EEAAO, but a mysterious plot to oust the biggest threat to a person’s power could describe both Navalny and Everything Everywhere All at Once.