Documentaries Finally in Oscars' Spotlight

Making a pest of himself on screen to those in power, Moore is also an expert director and polemicist, and "Sicko" is the only nominee to reach a large audience, making more than $25 million in U.S. theaters.

Mark Urman, the head at ThinkFilm (which is releasing "Taxi" and "War/Dance"), said that, Moore's film aside, last year was grim for nonfiction at the box office. "I don't think it had anything to do with the subject matter or whether they were political," he said. "Uplifting films, every documentary that was released, underperformed."

We'll never really know how much the list of nominees simply reflects the quirks of the committees, drawn from the Academy's documentary branch, which chose them through two rounds of voting.

Their list of 15 semifinalists included works stronger than some of those nominated, like "Lake of Fire," Tony Kaye's immersion in both sides of the abortion issue. Its exclusion shouldn't be surprising in this year of "Juno," when the film industry prefers not to view abortion as the politically divisive issue it still is.

But if the committees' choices weren't flawless, they do reflect the current landscape of politically engaged films. There is no nominee as fluffy as the 2005 winner, "The March of the Penguins." The most uplifting, "War/Dance," might have been "Spellbound" with music, except for the crucial difference that the children live in a camp threatened by guerrilla forces. The film is unsparing as one boy looks into the camera and describes being abducted by the rebels and forced to bludgeon some farmers to death.

Getting an Oscar nomination gives these films a giant push at creating the snowball of media attention that may be the truest sign of a documentary's success. And the Oscars will, at least for the time it takes to announce the category's winner, be more than a glimpse at pop culture glamour. When I asked Ferguson if the nomination was having any effect on his film, he said he had no evidence that it had so far, but added: "If the film wins, there will be one effect. I will have about 60 seconds to say something about Iraq to 200 million people, and I will."

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