The DGA snub just made Nathan Fielder's doc a Best Picture contender
The Directors Guild ruled that You Can See Everything isn't a feature film. The ruling removes it from every list that makes Oscar season predictable.
TheWrap reported the decision on October 27: the DGA ruled You Can See Everything ineligible for its top theatrical feature prize, routing it into the guild's documentary category instead. The guild's rules exclude documentaries from the feature award, and Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's film sits exactly on the line those rules were never built to handle: vérité footage of Elizabeth Holmes — who invited a skeptical crew in 34 days before her prison sentence, starting a three-year project — intercut with reenactments starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes.
The ruling is category-specific, and that's the loophole. The Academy's Best Picture criteria don't copy the DGA's, so A24's For Your Consideration page still lists the film for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Documentary, all at once.
A documentary outgrossing the features
The word "documentary" is doing unusual work for a film performing like this:
- Opened October 16 in US theaters, at 2 hours 55 minutes.
- Second weekend: $19.5 million — within $5 million of Clayface, the weekend's No. 1, and ahead of every other feature in release.
- Budget: $7 million, and the film is already climbing the all-time documentary chart, where the ceiling has been Fahrenheit 9/11's $119 million domestic since 2004.
No documentary has ever been nominated for Best Picture, let alone won one. The Academy, unlike the DGA, has no rule preventing it — only habit, enforced every year by precursor season, the stretch of guild prizes that pre-sorts the race before the Academy votes.
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The snub is the campaign
That filtering is exactly what the DGA just made impossible. The film won't appear on the guild's feature list on January 7; it competes among documentaries on January 6, with the ceremony on January 30. Pundit models that run on precursor data now have a $19.5-million-a-weekend hole in them.
"The Oscars have been pretty boring over the last few years because precursors have made the whole thing feel predictable. Having a potential nominee that's not eligible for any of those precursors could be the wildcard we need to make awards season fun again."
— a commenter on r/movies
The competition is already looking over its shoulder. In a thread about the season's other hopefuls, the film shows up as the thing everyone else has to beat:
"And it's up against a 3 hr documentary with the potential to be the first ever to win best picture."
— a commenter on r/movies
The DGA ruled You Can See Everything isn't a feature film. In its second weekend it outgrossed every feature film in America except one.
The guild handed Fielder the only campaign position better than frontrunner: unclassifiable. A Best Picture nomination would be the first for any documentary in the award's history, and it would arrive precisely because the film never had to survive the lists that kill unusual contenders — the most predictable awards season in years just acquired the one race nobody can model.
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