Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Smartypants Pictures
When some people hear the word “documentary,” a wall goes up and their eyes glaze over. Documentaries often get a bad rap for being boring or preachy, the kinds of films that you would watch in your AP History class that are so stale, you’d rather just be doing actual work. It’s no coincidence that the documentaries and docuseries turned out in quick succession by major streaming forces like Netflix are designed to be loud, outrageous, and over the top. This kind of programming is relatively inexpensive to make, but in order to reel in audiences, you’ve got to hook them with something flashy.
It’s unlikely that you’ll find anything like The Tinder Swindler or The Price of Glee on the Oscar Nominee shortlist. Instead, the Academy tends to keep things a little more classic when it comes to its choice of documentaries to highlight. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that these films will shake that archaic notion to equate documentaries with an afternoon siesta. It just means that these films acknowledged by the most vaunted cinematic voting body should have something enduring to say.
Major significance can come in small packages too. While feature-length Oscar-nominated documentaries can feel heady or inaccessible (sometimes literally—anyone waiting to see All the Beauty and the Bloodshed still has to wait a couple more weeks to stream it on HBO Max), their abbreviated counterparts provide a world’s worth of information in less than an hour. Indeed, the five documentary shorts up for the Oscar this year are all working in top form to pack as much substance as possible into a tight runtime.