The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best feature documentary of 1988. The National Board of Review gave it the D. W. Griffith Award for the same reason. In four different newspaper polls of the nation's critics, it placed first as the best film of the year, feature or documentary.
Last fall, the Independent Documentary Assn., an organization composed of people involved in the medium, gave it one of its five fraternal "IDA" awards for distinguished achievement. And last week, due to evidence collected in the making of the movie, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned a verdict that had put the subject of the film on Death Row 12 years ago.
If there was ever a film with a lock on an Academy Award, Erroll Morris' "The Thin Blue Line" appeared to be it. It had a profound topic, overwhelming critical acclaim and the kind of respectful media coverage that benefits the entire industry. Morris himself was the subject of a 15,000-word profile in New Yorker magazine, and there were those in Hollywood who thought he might become the first person to receive a best director nomination for a documentary.
But when the Oscar nominations were announced last month, the names of Morris and "The Thin Blue Line" were nowhere to be found, a fact that shocked critics and finlm makers alike.
"It is one of the most outrageous things in the modern history of the academy," said English director Michael Apted, who has made both features ("Coal Miner's Daughter," "Gorillas in the Mist") and documentaries ("28 Up"). "For my money, it was the best piece of film in any category. That they ignored it diminishes the academy."
Film critic Roger Ebert, who lists Morris' 1979 "Gates of Heaven" as one of the 10 best films ever made, called the slighting of "The Thin Blue Line" "the worst non-nomination" of the year and attributed its rejection to the inability of academy voters to appreciate innovative film making.
"If (Morris) had done a '60 Minutes' documentary with talking heads, film clips and conventional narration, they would have nominated it," Ebert said.
Perhaps they would have. In interviews with several of the 40 members of the academy's documentary committee, the film's style--its blend of interviews, reenactments and fetishist-like close-ups of police lights, pistols and other murder scene objects--was often mentioned as being off-putting.
"I think this is a case of the emperor has no clothes," said one documentary film maker on the committee. "I was shocked that the film had gotten all that attention, and my own evaluation was so different. The critical accolades were stunningly different from what I observed."
From interviews done for this story, it doesn't appear that "The Thin Blue Line" even came close to receiving a nomination. All but one of the members interviewed said they did not consider it one of the five best films they saw. In fact, at the committee screening of "The Thin Blue Line," enough members raised their hands to have the film stopped before it was completed.
It is a common democratic procedure, committee members explained, to have a film turned off when enough of them request it. It is a process that one member described as "dumping," something that occurs frequently when there's a heavy workload.
Arthur Nadel, chairman of the academy's documentary committee, said 74 films were submitted this year, adding up to between 100 and 150 hours of viewing, if each one was played to the end.
How much of "The Thin Blue Line" did the committee see before they dumped it?
"It was 85% of the way through," one member in attendance that night said. "Some of us stayed and they showed the rest of it. But it's unfair to say the others might have voted differently if they'd watched it all. The film was \o7 not\f7 liked."
Chuck Workman, whose "Precious Images" won him an Oscar in 1986 (in the short films-live action category), said he considered "The Thin Blue Line" one of the best films of the year and that he was surprised it did not get nominated. But Workman said he did not think there was anything political in the rejection.
"There is very little politics involved in that group," he said. "They have minds of their own and vote the way they see it. A lot of people just didn't like the movie."
Nominations for documentaries, both shorts and features, involve preliminary and final voting. After each screening, members evaluate the film on a scale of 4 to 10 and jot their ratings down in booklets that remain with the academy. After they've seen all of the submitted films, they get together for a day to discuss what they've seen ("We argue and lobby each other," one member said), then they vote again. Only the final votes, which are turned over immediately to Price-Waterhouse, count. (Voting for the actual Oscar is done by all academy members, who validate their attendance at screenings of all five nominees.)
At this year's wrap-up nominations meeting, "The Thin Blue Line" was hardly discussed, members say.
