Editor's Note: (Lisa Kennedy was film critic for the Denver Post for 13 years and its theater critic for three. She is currently at work on a book of conversations with African-American influencers about the movies that shaped them. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.)
(CNN) One of the best moments during the 89th Academy Awards may fly under the radar for the millions of viewers expected to tune into the Oscar telecast Sunday night -- which is a shame.
We don't know yet who will present the statuette for best documentary feature, but we do know they'll be participating in Oscar history. Of the five movies vying for the award, four were directed by black filmmakers: "13th" by Ava DuVernay, "I Am Not Your Negro" by Raoul Peck, "Life, Animated" by Roger Ross Williams and "O.J.: Made in America" by Ezra Edelman. "Fire at Sea," Italian Gianfranco Rosi's elegiac film about a small Mediterranean island and the refugee crisis, completes a category impressive for its artistic vigor and demanding timeliness.
Let's pause for a moment of perspective: Those four filmmakers almost tie the number of black directors nominated for awards during Oscar's previous 88 years (There have been six). Add to the mix Barry Jenkins's best-director nod for "Moonlight" and this year's slate of at-the-helm talent is even more thrilling — and telling. Not just for what it says about Hollywood in the near term but what it says, just as vitally, about the filmmakers and the subjects they took on.
While there will be a number of folks all too pleased to take credit for (or blame for) this historic lineup on the hashtag activism of last year's #OscarSoWhite, that would be wrongheaded. The social-media campaign itself encouraged a kind of easy pop-culture myopia. It wasn't really the woeful number of nominees that matters. It was the concern that the dearth of diverse stories overall, the paltry numbers of storytellers -- writers, directors, producers -- reflected the broader industry's lack of commitment to inclusion.
The recent movement of three of the documentaries resonate with isn't #OscarsSoWhite -- it's Black Lives Matter, which is directly referenced in "13th" and "I Am Not Your Negro," and foreshadowed in the O.J. film with its backdrop of the degraded, at times violent, relationship — tenuous from the start — between the LAPD and the city's black citizens.
Asked about the relationship of #OscarsSoWhite to this year's boomlet, for instance, "Hidden Figures" star (and Oscar winner) Octavia Spencer told online industry site Deadline, "I think that's what you guys are thinking, but when you know how movies are made, the explosion of films with people of color is not a reaction to #OscarsSoWhite." Although documentaries can be more nimble when it comes to inserting up-to-date footage, it's just not practical to crank up production on a movie — such a slow-moving behemoth compared to a television show — to satisfy a social-media campaign.
We Americans are constantly trying to grab hold of history, to own our moment in it, to distinguish the dramatic blips from the more enduring changes. What progress lasts? Will this year's slate of nominees lead to more jobs, inspire more storytellers and build a broader audience for their films?
These questions are highly relevant to the worlds explored in the nominated documentaries. Change — and the fragility of it — is the urgent quandary coursing through three of them: "13th," "I Am Not Your Negro" and "O.J.: Made in America." Each film is heady and wrenching, each is required viewing. DuVernay, Peck and Edelman employ very different approaches to their subjects, which means we don't have to force any one of them to be the singular exposition of all our woes as a nation when it comes to race. That, in itself, is cause for jubilation.
DuVernay, and her humbling roster of thinkers and activists, trace a dismaying line from a clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution (used to re-subjugate freed slaves by criminalizing them) to the abuses of the Jim Crow South to today's mass incarceration crisis. Edelman opens wide the lens on the story of O.J Simpson and the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman to better understand what the hell had happened in Los Angeles that would allow the Brentwood-cloistered Simpson to become proxy for the oppressed Black Man. With a visual eloquence befitting his subject, Haitian filmmaker Peck tells the story of James Baldwin's struggles to wrest meaning from the assassinations of three of his friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
If there is a potential cloud to Oscar night's silver lining, it would be the worry that too often artists of color get the attention of the mainstream only when they take on racism. In this sense, Williams's "Life, Animated" is an intriguing outlier.
With vivid use of film clips from the Disney archives and original animation, Williams introduces us to Owen Suskind — the much-loved and privileged son of writer Ron Suskind — who breaks through the wall of autism with his beloved animated flicks as a portal. Few know that Williams already has an Oscar. His 2010 short documentary "Music By Prudence" recounts the journey of Zimbabwean singer-songwriter Prudence Mabhena, born with a disability that some associated with witchcraft.
What's so impressive about this year's best documentary feature category is how varied it is. There's a stirring diversity of style and tone. All documentaries do not look alike. Yet, taken together they get at just how profound our challenges not just as Americans but humans remain and how ready our artists, activists, filmmakers are to take them on.
In a letter to his literary agent, James Baldwin characterized the book he hoped to write about his friends as a journey. "(A) journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find or what what you find will do to you."
This year's doc nominees insist we take a journey, perhaps more known but potentially as harrowing as the one Baldwin embarked on. Can it rile you? Absolutely. Will it change us? That's the hope.