Oscar Winner Roger Ross Williams: Spending On Oscar Doc Campaigns Has “Gotten Insane” — CPH:DOX
deadline.comOscar winner and Academy member Roger Ross Williams is saying publicly what many in the documentary community have stewed over privately – that the sums of money being spent on Oscar documentary campaigns has “gotten insane.” And Williams, a former Academy Governor representing the Doc Branch, says something may be done about it. “We in the Academy, in the Doc Branch, have a campaign finance reform committee… to sort of try to work through that and figure out solutions to that.
It’s gotten insane. It’s gazillions of dollars to get seen and heard,” he said, “and that’s so troubling because it should be on the merit of the films.” His remarks, less than two weeks after the Academy Awards, came in a discussion with documentary programmer and Pure Nonfiction podcaster Thom Powers at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen.
Powers asked the filmmaker about “the escalating attention that awards season sucks up in our industry,” and Williams didn’t hold back. “We know it’s awards, it’s the Oscars — it’s a game, it costs.
But we are trying to deal with that as a branch, us documentarians, and we lead the way in the Academy,” Williams said. “The Doc Branch — the most diverse branch in the Academy, the most progressive branch in the Academy — we really lead the way.
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