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Clayton Davis
Chief Awards Editor
byClaytonDavis See All
Getty / A24 In nearly a century of Oscars, not a single documentary has been nominated for best picture. But that shouldn’t be the case.
While a documentary can win its own Oscar, reshape the cultural conversation and become one of the defining films of its era, these nonfiction feature films have been excluded from the top category meant to honor the year’s best filmmaking. When the Academy expanded the Best Picture lineup from five to 10 after the snub of “The Dark Knight” (2008), the press release led with the possibility of a documentary getting recognized. That has yet to happen … perhaps until now?
That assumption is finally being tested this season with “You Can See Everything,” Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s nonfiction sensation about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Acclaim and box office success are raising the possibility that a documentary could finally break one of the Academy’s longest-standing barriers. If it earns a nomination, the achievement would be historic. But it would also raise an uncomfortable question: Why did it take this long?
To celebrate this potential historic nomination, Variety is ranking the 20 films that should have received a best picture nomination in the past 40 years.
The films mentioned here span genres, styles and subjects, from the pursuit of an NBA dream to a high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers, from a confrontation with Indonesia’s history of mass killing to a real-time account of Edward Snowden’s revelations.
You can blame the Academy at large for some of these omissions; others tie directly to the Documentary Branch itself, which snubbed many of them in its own category.
If “You Can See Everything” finally breaks through, it will undoubtedly have earned its place in history. But it should not have been the first. Many others from this very year could also be deemed worthy, such as “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” and “Naza.”
Read the list below.
Honorable mentions: “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006); “Senna” (2010); “The Act of Killing” (2012); “Apollo 11″ (2019)
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Daughters (2024)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Sundance Institute Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s “Daughters” follows four girls preparing for a father-daughter dance inside a Washington, D.C., prison as part of a fatherhood program Patton helped build.
The filmmakers’ choice to focus on the girls’ anticipation, anger and longing is its strongest element. It carries the film toward a dance sequence of almost unbearable tenderness.
It won both the Audience Award and the Festival Favorite prize at Sundance, then made the documentary shortlist only to miss the nomination at the 2025 ceremony. Few films that year said more about love under impossible conditions.
