| Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature | |
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| Presented by | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences |
| Country | United States |
| Official website | http://www.oscars.org |
The Academy Award for Documentary Feature is among the most prestigious awards for documentary films.
Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year (that is, the year they were released under the Academy's rules for eligibility). In practice, due to the limited nature of documentary distribution, a film may be released in different years in different venues, sometimes years after production is complete.
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In 1942, there was one Documentary category and four winners.
From 1943 there were two separate documentary categories (features and short films)
Many critically acclaimed documentaries are not nominated. Examples include The Thin Blue Line, Roger & Me, Touching The Void, Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Waiting For Superman. (see below). The controversy over Hoop Dreams was enough to force the Academy Awards to change their documentary voting system.[1]
For example, Grizzly Man, a documentary strong enough to appear on many critics' top 10 lists[2] was not nominated, and did not even make the Academy's internally distributed top 15 list. Grizzly Man's exclusion was later revealed to be the result of an Academy rule disqualifying documentary films that are constructed entirely out of archive footage. However, Grizzly Man included new interviews and other footage shot exclusively for the film.
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, at the time the highest grossing documentary film ever made, was ineligible because Moore had opted to have it played on television prior to the 2004 Election. Conversely, the 1982 winner Just Another Missing Kid, directed by John Zaritsky, was created by editing together footage he originally shot for the Canadian investigative journalism TV show The Fifth Estate.
Although documentaries are eligible for the Academy Award for Best Picture, none have yet earned a nomination.