It had been only two months since the attack on Pearl Harbor when the Academy announced the nominees for the 1941 Oscars, but that was enough time for it to realize the necessity for a documentary film category and for filmmakers, especially in the countries already involved in the war, to make films that qualified. In the days before television, the movies were the only source for visual information about what was going on in the world elsewhere, and the war made it clear that newsreels, traditionally part of the movie exhibition package, wouldn't be sufficient. Eventually the category would expand to features, especially with such eminent filmmakers as John Ford and William Wyler lending their talents to the efforts to document the war, but this year's documentary nominees were all short films.
The nominees were ...
(Short)
- Adventure in the Bronx, Film Associates
- Bomber, United States Office for Emergency Management Film Unit
- Christmas Under Fire, British Ministry of Information
- Churchill's Island, National Film Board of Canada
- Letter From Home, British Ministry of Information
- Life of a Thoroughbred, Truman Talley, producer
- Norway in Revolt, The March of Time
- A Place to Live, Philadelphia Housing Association
- Russian Soil, Amkino
- Soldiers of the Sky, Truman Talley, producer
- War Clouds in the Pacific, National Film Board of Canada
And the Oscar went to ...
Churchill's Island, National Film Board of Canada.
Effective propaganda film about the British resistance to the Nazis, if somewhat heavy on melodramatic narration. The speaker is Lorne Greene, who was a top Canadian radio newscaster, earning the nickname "The Voice of Doom" for his wartime newsreading, before he came south in the 1950s and became a TV star. It's fitting that the NFB, established in 1939 primarily as a propaganda outlet, should be the first winner of the documentary Oscar. It went on to win eleven more Academy Awards, many of them for animated films after filmmaker Norman McLaren joined the organization in 1941, and a total -- so far -- of seventy-two nominations.
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