The International Documentary Association (IDA), Cinema Eye Honors and Gotham Awards have voted on their favorite feature documentaries of the year.
For the streamers, it’s a grim result. Titles from Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV+ are absent from the Gothams’ documentary feature selections, the Cinema Eye’s top feature and director nominations and the IDA’s 17-title shortlist.
With Oscar campaigning in high gear, they pose the question: Is a streamer backlash brewing?
The IDA lists are drawn from independent committees comprising 280 filmmakers, curators, critics and industry experts.
“We had really robust debates among the panelists,” says Ken Ikeda, the IDA’s interim executive director. “Our sense is that we did not get as strong an intake of major studio films this year.
It was not an explicit intention of the group [to exclude the streamers, but I think they were very clear that, even with the opportunity to advance several more films to the shortlist, they opted not to.”
Streamers have dominated the docu race in recent years.
In March, HBO Max and now-defunct CNN+’s Navalny won the Oscar for doc feature.
The previous year, Hulu and Disney+ had Questlove’s Summer of Soul.
Netflix scored back-to-back wins in 2020 and 2021 with American Factory and My Octopus Teacher, respectively.
The streamer has earned at least one docu Oscar nomination every year since its first one, a decade ago with Jehane Noujaim’s The Square.
