DuVernay's 14th leads Critics Choice. 8 of 11 winners missed Oscars

Eight of the 11 films that have won Best Documentary Feature at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards were not nominated for the Oscar. That is the record Ava DuVernay's 14th walked into on Tuesday, when it led the 11th edition's nominations with six.

The count is ours, made by setting the Critics Choice Association's winners against the Academy's nominee lists for every year since the awards began in 2016. Ten ceremonies have produced 11 winners, because 2024 ended in a tie. Three of those films went on to an Oscar nomination. Two won.

What 14th is up for

DuVernay's film, a Netflix release about the Fourteenth Amendment, is nominated for documentary feature, director, editing, score, political documentary and historical documentary, TheWrap reported. Three films sit one behind it on five: You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes film from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim; David Greaves's Once Upon a Time in Harlem; and Nuisance Bear. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety carry the same totals.

Ten films are up for the top prize. Alongside those three (Nuisance Bear is not among them) are Everest: The Other Side, Everybody to Kenmure Street, The History of Concrete, Musk, NAZA, Rehearsals for a Revolution and Remake, according to the full list published by The Contending.

Netflix has the most to gain. Counting every category on that list, its titles fill 18 of the 117 nomination slots, a third of them belonging to 14th.

Three out of eleven

Here are the winners, in order. O.J.: Made in America in 2016. Jane in 2017. Won't You Be My Neighbor? in 2018, Apollo 11 in 2019, Dick Johnson Is Dead in 2020. Summer of Soul in 2021, Good Night Oppy in 2022, Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie in 2023. In 2024 the prize was shared by Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story and Will & Harper, as the association's own announcement records. Last year it went to The Perfect Neighbor.

Only the first, the sixth and the last of those reached the Academy's five. O.J.: Made in America and Summer of Soul won the Oscar. The Perfect Neighbor was nominated in January, as NPR's list of the 98th Academy Awards nominees shows, and lost in March to Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

The middle of the run is the striking part. From 2017 to 2024, eight ceremonies crowned nine films, and one of the nine was nominated by the Academy.

Look at what the misses have in common. Jane Goodall, Fred Rogers, Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve and Will Ferrell are five subjects an audience already loves. Two more are about space missions. Critics Choice voters like a film that sends a ballroom home happy, and the Academy's documentary branch has spent a decade proving it does not vote that way.

The list is better than the prize

The nominee list tells a different story. Steve Pond at TheWrap puts it at 26 of 113: the number of Critics Choice feature nominees over ten years that went on to an Oscar nomination. Matching the two sets of lists title by title, we get 27 (four, three, three, three, three, four, two, two, one and two, year by year). We could not find the film that accounts for the difference. Either way, a little over half of the Academy's 50 nominees in that time had been on the critics' list first.

Seven of the ten Oscar winners were there too. The critics simply gave their own prize to something else. Only twice in ten years has the film that won in New York in November also won in Hollywood in March.

And the overlap is shrinking. In the first three years the Critics Choice list contained ten of the Academy's 15 nominees. In the last three it contained five. Pond's explanation is that the Academy's branch has become more international while the critics have not: since 2019, he writes, 75% of the critics' top-category nominees have been American-made, against under 29% of the Oscar nominees.

The three Oscar winners the critics left off their feature list entirely were Icarus, No Other Land and Mr. Nobody Against Putin. Two of those are the two most recent winners.

Which kind of winner 14th would be

So a win on the night is closer to a warning than a forecast. The better question is which sort of Critics Choice winner 14th resembles, and here DuVernay has cause for optimism.

The three that converted were O.J.: Made in America, Summer of Soul and The Perfect Neighbor. Each is about Black American life and how the country treated it. None is a portrait of somebody famous and adored. A film arguing that birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection are under attack, which is how Deadline described 14th after its London Film Festival screening on Monday, belongs with that group.

She has been here before, too. At the first ceremony in 2016 her 13th had five nominations, level with O.J.: Made in America, and won three awards, including a separate best feature prize for television and streaming films that no longer exists. It was then nominated for the Oscar and lost to the same film. Ten years on, the follow-up leads the field outright.

The reviews are less unanimous than the nominations. The Hollywood Reporter was admiring. RogerEbert.com ran its notice under a headline saying DuVernay means well but does not rise to the occasion.

The film the list undersells

NAZA has three nominations: feature, director and political documentary. Its directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, were two of the four people who won the Oscar for No Other Land, a film the critics did not nominate for their top prize in 2024. It holds the record for the longest ovation at Venice, and on the evidence above, three nominations in New York says very little about its chances in Los Angeles. The same goes for the international films now arriving by the festival route, which this body tends to pass over.

That makes NAZA the one to watch. Not the leader.

The Critics Choice Documentary Awards are handed out on Sunday 8 November at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan, with Ross Mathews hosting. 14th opens in selected cinemas in the United States and Britain on 27 November and reaches Netflix on 4 December, the streamer has said.