O's 2009 Oscars® Cheat Sheet

By Jessica Winter


Best Documentary Feature


The Nominees
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Encounters at the End of the World
The Garden
Man on Wire 
Trouble the Water

The uniformly compelling shortlist of real-life tales emphasizes families and communities fighting to sustain themselves in the wake of violence and upheaval: war and emigration in The Betrayal, the 1992 Los Angeles riots in The Garden, and Hurricane Katrina in Trouble the Water. And the Antarctic cinematography of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World will take your breath away.

O's Winner Is…
Oscar goes to Man on Wire, the stirring, suspenseful account of Philippe Petit's historic tightrope-walk between the Twin Towers in 1974.

Missing in Action
The Unforeseen, which looks at overdevelopment and greed in Austin, Texas, succeeds as both a work of investigative journalism and a philosophical rumination on the earth and our place on it.

Netflix This
The Man on Wire, disc has a new interview with Philippe Petit and an animated short depicting his death-defying walk, narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal. The Encounters DVD packs in more than three hours of extras, including gorgeous under-the-ice footage and a lengthy interview between Herzog and Rachel Getting Married director Jonathan Demme.


 

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