AwardsWatch - FINAL 2024 Oscar Predictions: DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

FINAL 2024 Oscar Predictions: DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

It’s been a strange road for the documentary feature contenders this year, a fun category as it has one of the larger amount of guilds and precursors leading up to the Oscars.

The International Documentary Association, Cinema Eye Honors, Producers Guild of America, BAFTA and Critics Choice all hand out awards for nonfictions films and all five came up with different winners, a near statistical anomaly but this year simply saw much less crossover among the groups with CEH, PGA and Critics Choice all going to films who didn’t end up Oscar-nominated.

One thing we can pretty much still count on is the Critics Choice Curse, which held strong again this year. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie was the overwhelming critics’ favorite and won the Critics Choice top documentary prize and once again, the documentary branch snubbed the frontrunner. This has actually become one of the easiest things to predict each season, steering clear of the CCA winner.

20 Days in Mariupol, the film that hit the most across the board (four out of five) and has the most topical awareness should be a relatively easy pick to win here.

Here are my ranked final 2024 Oscar predictions for Documentary Feature.

1. 20 Days in Mariupol (BAFTA, CCA, CEH, PGA)
Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner and Raney Aronson-Rath

2. Bobi Wine: The People’s President (IDA)
Moses Bwayo, Christopher Sharp and John Battsek

3. The Eternal Memory (CCA, CEH)
Nominees to be determined

4. To Kill a Tiger
Nisha Pahuja, Cornelia Principe and David Oppenheim

5. Four Daughters (CEH)
Kaouther Ben Hania and Nadim Cheikhrouha

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.