Culminating an awards-laden year that began with the Audience Award at Sundance 2009, The Cove, directed by Louis Psihoyos and produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DePre Pesman, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Stevens, accepting the honor, said, "We tried to make an entertaining film that also tried to enlighten everybody." And just as Stevens introduced Psihoyos as "the man who came up with the idea," Rick O'Barry, the man devoted to saving the dolphins, held up a sign, "Text...Dolphin," and the Academy denied the director the chance to speak, even though he had 15 seconds left. Look, AMPAS, I know that many honorees over the years have used the podium as a forum for getting a message out, but please: Don't deny a guy a once-in-a-lifetime chance to speak about this career-defining achievement; there was nothing about O'Barry's gesture that will incur the wrath of the FCC. If time was the issue--and it wasn't--how about cutting the John Hughes tribute? Was he really that much greater than the great individuals who passed last year? Nonetheless, I do commend the Academy for showing longer-than-usual clips from the nominated feature docs.
See the acceptance speech by The Cove filmmakers at Oscar.com here.
Moving on, Music by Prudence, directed by Roger Ross Williams and produced by Elinor Burkett, received three rousing ovations at DocuDays on Saturday morning, with Prudence Mabhena herself in attendance. I later had the privilege of attending a party hosted by HBO, at which she performed with piano accompaniment. Those two events, in a way, foreshadowed the film's Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Accepting the award with Williams, Burkett said, "In a world in which most of us are told and tell ourselves that we can't, Liyana, the band behind this film, teaches us that we're wrong. Against all odds they did, so we can. So the bottom line is, to me, my role models and my heroes, Marvelous and Energy, Tapiwa, Goodwell, the whole rest of the band and especially Prudence."
I did notice that Burkett had muscled her way onto the podium--I had figured that it had taken a while longer to make her way down, and she was hurrying to meet the 45-second acceptance speech allotment. But following up observations from audience members that she had "pulled a Kanye,"-- in reviewing the acceptance speech drama, I noticed that she did say, "Can a man let a woman talk? Isn't that just the classic thing?..."-- Salon.com spoke to both Burkett and Williams, and apparently there have been considerable friction between the producer and director over creative differences-considerable enough to have resulted in a lawsuit, which has since been settled. Since the Academy only allows one person to speak, Williams was the designated guy.
