Michael Moore has announced that he will not seek the “Best Documentary” Oscar for Fahrenheit 9/11 because he’d rather the film could air on television before the election. Given that his film is certainly a shoo-in for the award (given that it’s a meager category and the movie industry is by no means non-partisan), it is a bit of a sacrifice for him. It’s too bad he doesn’t go for the obvious loophole, which I’ve bolded:

The only problem with my desire to get this movie in front of as many Americans as possible is that, should it air on TV, I will NOT be eligible to submit “Fahrenheit 9/11” for Academy Award consideration for Best Documentary. Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release (fiction films do not have the same restriction).

Okay, it’s an obvious joke…but in all seriousness, none of Michael Moore’s movies truly qualify as documentaries. They are filmed opinion pieces comprised of stock footage, staged film moments and comedy bits as well as standard documentary content.

If “Jackass: The Movie” were ever up for an Oscar, it would probably not be eligible for the documentary category. Sure, it is something of a reality show in that it contains real people and real reactions, but it’s all setup planned for the camera. If all of Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” sketches were strung together and released theatrically, would it be a documentary? Sure, it’s comprised of Jay asking questions of real people, doing no more planning than coming up with the questions and setting out with a camera to see what happens. But to reach the goal of saying, “The American people sure are uneducated!” they leave out all the people who answer correctly and leave in all the comedy gold mines. Given that that is what Moore has done with soldiers in Iraq, the Iraq interviews are only a scouche off of a Jay Leno Jaywalking segment.

Saying that it’s a fiction film doesn’t mean it can’t be “true” in the points it is getting across. I think there’s a lot of truth in the movie “Broadcast News”, for example.

Defenders of Moore such as Roger Ebert state that all documentary films have an agenda. Well yes, most documentary makers think thoughts like “The Holocaust was bad” or “Kids in spelling competitions work hard” but I’m not sure that it’s such an agenda. Do Holocaust filmmakers have to splice out all of the terrific times in the concentration camps in order to stick to their point? Do the makers of “Spellbound” cut out all of the students’ scenes where they are smoking pot and watching The Price Is Right because it would contradict the impression of the kids they want to put in their film?

It’s time the Academy Awards tightened up their standards for documentaries. As I noted in my review of “Winged Migration”, that film should never have qualified for the category of documentary either. It’s merely a film with animal actors. When the filmmakers have to change their movie because they want to show the birds suffering in drought-stricken Africa, only to arrive and find that Africa has plenty of water and that just won’t DO…then they aren’t making a documentary.

Of course, this is all academic. The Academy Awards suck. I’ve known this ever since the costume design for “Gandhi” beat out “Tron.”