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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Doc Corner: Ava DuVernay's '13th' is Essential

by Glenn Dunks

Sometimes to be a film-lover is to question why we indulge in certain films. It’s a question we have no doubt all asked ourselves at one point or another after a particularly gruelling film. It would have been so much easier to just let it slip passed us and be content within our bubble. It would be easy to see 13th, for instance, the new documentary from Selma and Middle of Nowhere director Ava DuVernay, on our Netflix screens and think that it is not for us – that because we already see the world through a lens of equality without racism that it is not necessary viewing, that it is just preaching to the converted. Why spend 100 minutes feeling as if the weight of misery is bearing down on us?

But 13th is an essential viewing for everybody. It is essential for you and for myself. Essential for Americans and those outside its borders. Essential most of all for white people and black people and everybody else. That its subject and themes still bear immediate relevance make it so. But DuVernay’s best achievement with the thorough and the soulfully searching 13th isn’t that it is just a wake-up call for race relations in America right at this very moment, but that her film will no doubt prove to be invaluable in the understanding of America’s history of racism for years to come.

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Weiner, 13th, and OJ: Made In America Among DOC NYC Short List

One week after La La Land won the Toronto People’s Choice Award – a key indicator of a film’s likelihood of securing an Oscar nomination for Best Picture – another major awards season clue has come to us in the form of the DOC NYC's Short List. DOC NYC is the largest documentary film festival in the country and it has hosted specially curated non-fiction in the city since 2010, but don’t let its infancy fool you. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And by anywhere, I specifically mean the Academy’s own shortlist for Best Documentary Feature; in the last five years, the ultimate winner of the prize and a bulk of runners-up have played the fest.

This year, the crop of fifteen films headed to DOC NYC include Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s marvelous collision of media and politics Weiner, Roger Ross Williams’ tear-jerker Life, Animated, and Ezra Edelman’s eight-hour saga OJ: Made in America. Legendary documentarians Barbara Kopple and Werner Herzog find themselves in the mix – as does the increasingly ambidextrous Ava DuVernay for her NYFF opener 13th – while well-received titles such as Under the Gun, The Eagle Huntress, and Strike a Pose (reviewed) are left on the sidelines.

The complete DOC NYC Short List is as follows
(Links go to our reviews of these films)

• Amanda Knox (Netflix) Dirs: Rod Blackhurst, Brian McGinn
• Cameraperson (Janus Films) Dir: Kirsten Johnson 
• Fire at Sea (Kino Lorber) Dir: Gianfranco Rosi 
• Gleason (Open Road & Amazon Studios) Dir: Clay Tweel
• I Am Not Your Negro (Magnolia Pictures) Dir: Raoul Peck
• Into The Inferno (Netflix) Dir: Werner Herzog
• Jim: The James Foley Story (HBO Documentary Films) Dir: Brian Oakes
• Life, Animated (The Orchard & A&E IndieFilms) Dir: Roger Ross Williams
• Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures (HBO Documentary Films) Dir: Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
• Miss Sharon Jones! (Starz) Dir: Barbara Kopple 
• OJ: Made in America (ESPN) Dir: Ezra Edelman
• 13th (Netflix) Dir: Ava DuVernay
• The Ivory Game (Netflix) Dir: Kief Davidson, Richard Ladkani
• Trapped (PBS-Independent Lens) Dir: Dawn Porter 
• Weiner (IFC Films & Showtime) Dir: Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg

Is there an Oscar winner in our midst? Personally, this is a reminder to get myself out to the theater to see Cameraperson ASAP. Which of these are your favorites and which are you most excited to check out?