Doc Corner: Emmy Awards Go to Meryl Streep, Ava DuVernay, and Somebody Close to an EGOT

Like sand through the hourglass, the Emmys gave out far too many trophies. I actually forgot that the television Academy’s ‘you’re not famous enough’ ceremony was on last weekend – because who wants to see RuPaul win an Emmy? Hello, anybody? Good call, Emmy! – and so my planned pre-Emmy focus on some of the documentary/non-fiction titles proved poorly timed. However, I thought we might look through the winners of the unfairly forgotten ceremony since at least in these categories, the voters are often forced to choose new winners every year. Meanwhile, the televised telecast could be a repeat and, truly, would anybody actually notice?

O.J.: Made in America, Meryl Streep, and which winner is just a Tony away from en EGOT after the jump.

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Oscar Nominees "O.J. Made In America" and "13th" Among 2017 Peabody Award-Winning TV Shows

by Daniel Crooke

Founded in 1938 with the intention of recognizing the very best in television and radio according to the metrics of singularity of vision and quality over popularity, the Peabody Awards celebrate their 76th annual honors this year with a crisp crop of cutting-edge content. While it’s thrilling to see Donald Glover achieve recognition for his marvelously fresh FX series Atlanta in its freshman year – not to mention Louis CK’s double dip with the self-financed, self-distributed Horace and Pete and Pamela Adlon’s sharp-as-nails take on single working motherhood in Better Things, which he co-created – what really stands out is the cross-pollination between television and film, which should come as no surprise to observers of filmed entertainment in today’s media landscape...

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Doc Corner: The Non-Fiction Class of 2016

This year’s Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature was a fiercely competitive one. With the strength of the 15-wide finalists list, quite frankly, it would have been hard to give us a truly bad line-up. We particularly weep for the omissions of Cameraperson, Tower, Zero Days and Weiner, but personal grouching aside about a couple of the nominees, this year’s batch is quite something. We have three films about race (one with queer undertones), a foreign language title, and the longest film ever nominated for an Academy Award.

The nominees are:

• Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi, Donatella Palermo)
• I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, Rémi Grellety, Hébert Peck)
• O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman, Caroline Waterlow)
• Life, Animated (Roger Ross Williams, Julie Goldman)
• 13th (Ava DuVernay, Spencer Averick, Howard Barish)

We will be looking at the documentary short nominees later (I have one title left to watch, which is proving difficult!), but now we're going to hypothesize how the doc feature nominees did it. Let us break down the imaginary math…

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Documentary Oscar Race Narrows to 14 Films (Plus 1 Mini-Series)

Oscar has winnowed down that massive Best Documentary Semi-Finals list to a more manageable fifteen. We've reviewed just over two thirds of them. Nine are currently available to stream online (handy links provided) and four are in select theaters. The finalists for the five nominations are...

• Cameraperson (IN THEATERS / on Criterion Collection Blu-Ray February 2017)
• Command and Control  (coming to PBS in January)
• The Eagle Huntress (IN THEATERS)
• Fire at Sea (IN THEATERS)
• Gleason (available to rent on Amazon)
• Hooligan Sparrow (streaming on Netflix)
• I Am Not Your Negro  (IN THEATERS FEB 2017)
• The Ivory Game (streaming on Netflix)
• Life, Animated (available to rent on iTunes)
• O.J.: Made in America (series available to purchase on iTunes)
• 13th (streaming on Netflix)
• Tower (IN THEATERS)
• Weiner (available to buy on iTunes)
• The Witness (streaming on Netflix)
• Zero Days (available to buy on iTunes)

What's missing? Well, what isn't. There are always scads of depressing omissions. Let us focus our tears on the delicious Sondheim retrospective reflection about "Merrily We Roll Along" The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened which really deserves a big audience. But all told this list is not surprising finals list. In fact I am quite shocked to tell you that in my Top 20 Most Likely To Oscar chart page (being revised at the moment) I missed only two of these fifteen (Command and Control and The Witness) in favor of films like Newtown and Miss Sharon Jones. 

Critics Choice Splinter Group Doc Prizes

You can't be both a feature film and a mini-series. Make up your mind! (Hopefully Oscar won't allow for shenanigans.)I don't think I got the memo from the Broadcast Film Critics Association this time. After fusing their TV awards into their movie awards like the Globes last season they're now separating out their doc prizes. I don't remember seeing a ballot. What's more they still haven't solved their loosey-goosey problems with pesky things like "categories." Somehow they've nominated O.J. Made in America for both Documentary Feature AND Documentary Limited Series. How can you be both things? Uff da. 

Nevertheless since Glenn has done such a fine job covering documentaries for us, it would be remiss not to note that we've already reviewed most of the nominees! The nominees in 13 categories (a silly abundance since many of the nominees repeat under different sub-categories) after the jump. Titles with links go to our reviews...

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