The uproar began at shouting level, and stayed there. In the Los Angeles Times, head film critic Kenneth Turan modestly proposed the members consider group suicide. A local radio critic dubbed them ““congenital idiots.’’ An investigation was called for. Fueling the fury was a backlist of celebrated films the committee had overlooked in the past, including ““Roger & Me,’’ ““Black Harvest,’’ ““Shoah,’’ ““The Thin Blue Line,’’ ““Sherman’s March’’ and ““28 Up.''
What could they have been thinking? Well, this is what they were thinking: ““Hoop Dreams’’ was too long. It had too much basketball. We liked five movies better. Responding to their critics, they said that until everyone saw the chosen five, no one had a right to carp. Fair enough. But now I’ve seen them – plus 10 more snubbed entries – and I’m more perplexed than ever. There’s a second scandal here: the L.A. Times just revealed that Terry Zwigoff’s penetrating ““Crumb,’’ the very disturbing portrait of the artist R. Crumb, was shut off by the committee after 25 minutes. They simply didn’t see one of the year’s finest documentaries. Clearly the committee was impatient: three of the nominated films run under an hour. You can see what the 169-minute ““Hoop Dreams’’ was up against.
Let me quickly add that the Oscar contenders – ““Freedom on My Mind,’’ ““A Great Day in Harlem,’’ ““D-Day Remembered,’’ ““Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision’’ and ““Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter’’ – are all good, or even better. They were not chosen bycongenital idiots. Let’s notforget the amazing moviesthey have nominated overthe years: ““Harlan County, U.S.A.,’’ ““American Dream,’’ ““The Times of Harvey Milk,’’ ““Best Boy,’’ ““Eyes on the Prize.’’ Nor am I convinced, as has been charged, that they conspire to punish popular films. My father, a screenwriter, served on this committee for some 40 years, and he assures me it is a contentious group of individuals much too cranky to conspiracize about anything.
But a few generalizations can be made. This is not a young gang: most Academy members who have the time to watch 64 documentaries tend to be retired. They’re politically liberal and esthetically conservative. It’s the films that have tried to push the documentary envelope that have been consistently overlooked. It often seems that what’s being honored is simply subject matter. Thus a well-meaning but overwrought movie about the Holocaust, such as the Oscar winner in 1982, ““Genocide,’’ would automatically be favored over, say, the drag queens of ““Paris Is Burning.’’ Filmmakers who discover stories – like the makers of ““Hoop Dreams,’’ or Steve M. Martin, who locates a Russian inventor kidnapped by Soviet agents in his astonishing ““Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey’’ – seem to get punished. The Academy feels safer in the archives than on the streets.
There’s some understandable generational bias. I’m sure R. Crumb means nothing to many older members of the committee, whereas D-Day was a pivotal moment in their lives. ““D-Day Remembered,’’ by the veteran Charles Guggenheim, a master at his craft, is made entirely of freshly chosen archival footage. The official film of the forthcoming National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, it’s a stirring example of memorial art, but it offers few new ideas.
Of these five, my vote would go to Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford’s moving ““Freedom on My Mind,’’ an in-depth analysis of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. This wonderful film brings that watershed battle for civil rights to vivid, complex life, with a revelatory look at the political betrayal at the 1964 Democratic convention, where the freedom delegates attempted to unseat the segregationist party regulars. (For the record, it beat out ““Hoop Dreams’’ for the 1994 jury prize at Sundance.) The most delightful of these films is Jean Bach’s affectionate ““A Great Day in Harlem,’’ which summons up the morning in 1958 when 58 jazz greats assembled to pose for an Esquire portrait. Cleverly edited by Susan Peehl, it’s a refreshing antidote to all the doomy movies about self-destructive musicians.
““Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,’’ made by Freida Lee Mock (former head of the documentary committee), begins stunningly as it recounts the controversy over Lin’s superb Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, but then gets stuck in an impersonal rhetorical groove. We learn a good deal about Lin’s work as an architect and artist; we get little sense of Lin as a woman. The one overtly personal documentary is ““Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter,’’ in which Deborah Hoffmann records her struggles dealing with her mother’s Alzheimer’s. Touching but wryly unsentimental, it’s a lovely, inspirational tribute to Hoffmann’s mother, but you come away feeling a lot of the pain has been edited out.
There were probably more first-rate docs last year than good studio movies, but the form still struggles in obscurity. That’s one reason passions run sohigh: a nomination can mean the difference between notoriety and oblivion. The ““Hoop Dreams’’ ruckus comes just as documentaries themselves are fighting for survival. If the NEA and NEH are gutted, movies like these – films that serve as our conscience and our collective memory – could become an endangered species. In the long run, the Oscar flap will seem silly (the publicity has done wonders for ““Hoop Dreams’s’’ grosses). The real mystery isn’t the baffling taste of the committee, but why we take the awards so seriously. Just remember: in 1972 Marcel Ophuls’s classic ““The Sorrow and the Pity’’ was beaten by a heavy-breathing bug movie called ““The Hellstrom Chronicle.’’ And still we’re surprised when they make a boo-boo!
