In , the first awards for feature-length documentaries were bestowed as Special Awards to Kukan and Target for Tonight.
Following the Academy's practice, films are listed below by the award year that is, the year they were released under the Academy's rules for eligibility. In practice, due to the limited nature of documentary distribution, a film may be released in different years in different venues, sometimes years after production is complete.
Finalists for Best Documentary Feature are selected by the Documentary Branch based on a preliminary ballot. A second preferential ballot determines the five nominees. These are the additional films that were shortlisted. For this Academy Award category, the following superlatives emerge: [ 35 ]. In , a group of 45 filmmakers filed a protest to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over a potential conflict of interest involving Mitchell Block.
They noted that Block was a member of the Documentary Steering Committee, which selects films as nominees, but he had a conflict of interest because his company Direct Cinema owned the distribution rights to three of the five films including eventual winner Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt [ 36 ] selected that year as nominees for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The controversy over Hoop Dreams ' exclusion was enough to have the Academy Awards begin the process to change its documentary voting system. They carried little flashlights. When one gave up on a film, he waved a light on the screen. When a majority of flashlights had voted, the film was switched off. Hoop Dreams was stopped after 15 minutes. The Academy's executive director, Bruce Davis, took the unprecedented step of asking accounting firm Price Waterhouse to turn over the complete results of that year's voting, in which members of the committee had rated each of the 63 eligible documentaries on a scale of six to ten.
