7. The Hoop Dreams Controversy
Even more diffuse is this, the story of Hoop Dreams' failure to land an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary at the 1995 Oscars, a snub so great it provoked Roger Ebert, who had championed Hoop Dreams as The Great American Documentary, into writing a blog entry entitled
The Anatomy of a Snub; a snub so profound it caused a change in the Oscars' rules and forced the creation of a new branch of AMPAS. Ebert suggests that the film's 165 minute run-time was a contributing factor in its snubbing, suggesting further that the AMPAS voters simply couldn't be bothered to sit through a film that long, instead electing to have it turned off after fifteen minutes via the flashlight system* which has since been abandoned as a consequence of the whole Hoop Dreams debacle . The truth is actually something closer to a small number of members manipulating the voting process - as outlined in
this piece by Steve Pond, who has the requisite space to explain fully - but however it happened, it remains that the Academy, through their own shortsightedness and sheer incompetence, managed to force a change in their own voting process, ensuring that Hoop Dreams gained far more exposure for this reason than any Oscar could ever give it. *To briefly explain: Each member was given a flashlight. If, after fifteen minutes, enough members flashed theirs at the screen, the film was stopped.