Every Oscar nominee has a path to a win, and only precedent allows us to gauge which path may be shorter than others. Most would agree that this year’s crop of nominees for documentary feature is among the strongest in this contentious category’s history. It’s so good, in fact, that it almost feels perverse to say that two of the three films here that don’t stand a chance at winning charged out of the gate last year feeling like de facto frontrunners.
Even if it’s by design, Sara Dosa’s playful and existentially profound Fire of Love, which consists almost entirely of archival footage shot by volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft throughout their careers, keeps its subjects at a distance. And if there’s one thing that Oscar voters like, it’s stories that are up-close and personal. That’s something that can be said about All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, and AMPAS certainly has an affinity for portraits of artists, but Laura Poitras’s film is much knottier than the likes of Amy and Searching for Sugar Man.
And because Simon Lereng Wilmont’s extraordinarily intimate and wrenching The House Made of Splinters is almost as free range as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, this race is most likely between Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes and Daniel Roher’s Navalny. Favoring the former is something that could be said about past winner My Octopus Teacher: that it makes it easy on viewers to respond to nature as an ideological innocent in the grand global scheme. The idea that nature knows better—if not necessarily “nature will find a way,” per Jurassic Park—is about as comforting a message as one can find in these Holocene end times.
Then there’s Navalny, which, compared to its fellow nominees, is practically square-peg in construction. But its trump card is that it’s possibly more volcanic in effect than even Fire of Love. Roher’s documentary has the twists and turns of a good thriller, and you could say that it leans on the trope of Russia as an “evil empire” (c.f. Bryan Fogel’s Oscar-winning Icarus). Certainly no other film in this category contains a moment as queasy as the one in which Aleksei A. Navalny places phone calls to the men he suspects were involved in the poisoning that nearly killed him in 2020 and gets one of those men to admit to the crime.
For as long as the war in Ukraine lasts, we will continue to see films like Navalny exalted in the West. (Mark our words: 20 Days in Mariupol is the documentary to beat at next year’s ceremony.) Regarding Roher’s film specifically, it’s a stinging indictment of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and if it has the edge over All That Breathes, it’s because Navalny’s sting operation proves that there’s nothing more powerful in a documentary than having the receipts.
Will Win: Navalny
Could Win: All That Breathes
Should Win: The House Made of Splinters
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