More on 'Feels Good Man'

[neonvincent]

I left this comment on Kek has apparently spoken. I decided to post this today because the awards will be given out tomorrow and I wanted to document my predictions, as bad as they are, on a space I control.

I haven't watched "Feels Good Man" yet, but that didn't stop me from predicting that it "might just be nominated for a Critics' Choice Documentary Award." It earned three nominations: Best Documentary Feature, Best First Documentary Feature, and Best Score. I'm only surprised it wasn't nominated for Best Political Documentary. I guess the selection committee didn't consider it about politics.

As for the documentary's future awards prospects, it might win Best First Documentary Feature, but not the other two. "Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution" is my personal favorite among Best Documentary Feature nominees and "Rising Phoenix" would likely win Best Score because I consider Daniel Pemberton to be the best composer among those nominated. I'm also pretty sure "Feels Good Man" will earn at least one nomination for a News and Documentary Emmy Award next summer.

I would be very pleasantly surprised if it earns one of the five nominations for Documentary Feature at the Oscars. That will depend very much on the mood of the Documentary Branch of the Motion Picture Academy. They deliberately do not nominate documentaries that will earn votes from the entire academy as a whole that they don't agree is the very best. They also don't like documentaries made with archive footage. They also have political axes to grind.

Three years ago, the Documentary Branch nominated "Icarus," a very anti-Russian sports documentary, in the wake of Trump's victory, and it won. The academy membership didn't have an anti-Trump nominee to vote for, so they jumped on the anti-Putin one. That's why I think that "Totally Under Control" about the administration's response to the pandemic, might actually have a chance at being nominated this year. The Documentary Branch normally does not renominate films by previous winners, which Alex Gibney is, having won for "Taxi to the Dark Side," regardless of merit, as they want to spread the recognition around, but they might just do that this year to signal their anti-Trump sentiment. If they don't nominate "Totally Under Control," they would very likely nominate "John Lewis: Good Trouble" about a critic of Trump instead. "Feels Good Man" may not satisfy that sentiment enough.