Numlock Awards: The Oscar-BAFTA Documentary Rift

It's been 14 years since the BAFTA winner wasn't nominated for the Oscar.

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Michael.

Best Documentary is not a category with a lot of helpful precursors — the Critics’ Choice abandoned documentary awards a decade ago, the Golden Globes have always avoided them, so that leaves us with the BAFTAs in terms of a major awards group (which also happens to have some membership overlap with the Academy).

And for the last four years, BAFTA and Oscar were aligned on Best Documentary. But this year, the BAFTA for Best Documentary went to Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which is not even nominated at the Oscars. It’s been 14 years since the BAFTA winner wasn’t also nominated at the Oscars, so this type of situation is quite rare.

The documentary branch at the BAFTAs tends to be more celebrity-skewing. Some recent BAFTA nominees include:

• Will & Harper, about Will Ferrell and Harper Steele

• Wham!, about the group Wham!

• Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, about Michael J. Fox

• Moonage Daydream, the only documentary confident enough not to need David Bowie’s name in the title

The Oscars have eschewed this type of celebrity-based project, and none of these films made it to Oscar night.

This year, the only two BAFTA nominees to transfer over to the Oscars are Black Box Diaries and No Other Land.

It’s one of the more interesting races this year. No Other Land has picked up a slew of critics’ prizes but hasn’t landed a distributor here in the United States (though there have been some screenings put on by media groups and film festivals). It’s directed by four filmmakers — two Palestinian, two Israeli — and it focuses on the Israeli government forcing Palestinians from a part of the West Bank in order to make room for a military training ground.

No Other Land is certainly the buzziest of the movies in the race for Best Documentary given the timeliness of the subject matter. The Academy has shifted more international over the last several years, as Walter has been documenting, so a movie with a lot of geopolitical relevance might have an edge. Consider, for example, that 20 Days in Mariupol, about the war in Ukraine, won last year, and was preceded by Navalny, about the Russian human rights activist. (And perhaps My Octopus Teacher took place in international waters? That counts!)

Black Box Diaries is the other BAFTA nominee competing for the Oscar. The movie follows a Japanese journalist, Shiori Itō, who accused a fellow journalist of sexual assault. Itō previously published a memoir about the subject, and then decided to turn the camera on herself as the case proceeded.

The three other nominees are Porcelain War, about the conflict in Ukraine, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, about the assassination of the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sugarcane, about the horrors of the Canadian Indian residential school system.

Still, it looks like a two-film race if we’re going on precursors. Last year, The Zone of Interest won Best International Film, and Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech, referencing the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, led to letters of support and denunciation after the Oscars. It can be a third-rail topic, which might make No Other Land’s path to victory harder. (The Zone of Interest was a historical film about the Holocaust, not a documentary about a current war.)

That being said, I’m feeling relatively confident No Other Land will be the winner come Oscar night. None of the other documentaries have made the same splash, it’s incredibly timely, and the Academy skews international.

What do you all think has the best chance at winning? Comment or reply to this email!